This is the response I received from Support:
Hello Nancy,
Thanks for reaching out to HubSpot Support and taking the time to provide this feedback on the recent prospects tool updates. This is a very valid concern and one that we have received from many customers. Our product team is aware of the demand for this feature to be returned but I will share that another customer has reached out. I’m sorry for how this update has impacted you!
To provide you with some more contact around this change, the prospects tool page activity data was being collected without direct consent from your website visitors, making this data not 100% GDPR compliant. For this reason, the decision to remove the prospects recent activities feature was executed for the time being. There is currently no plan in place to re-instate this feature but if this does occur, you should see it on our product updates page, here. The feature was not removed due to your specific GDPR compliance or other HubSpot customer portals, rather to ensure that HubSpot’s analytics tracking and your data itself is compliant.
The reason this change was implemented across all prospects, not only EU based IPs is because the IP address is not a reliable identifier of a person’s actual location or citizenship e.g. if someone is using a VPN for example, it might not be their actual location. Also, if your audience is one that frequently flies for business, there is a chance that an EU citizen being in America and not seeing the privacy display as he/she should. There is no way for HubSpot to tell who’s information we can share in the Prospects tool without their consent based on IP.
I know this is making a large impact on your use of HubSpot. If you would like to discuss this change further, I’d recommend reaching out to your account manager. If you need their contact details, please let me know.
I hope this helps to clarify, do let me know if you have any further questions on this at all, always happy to help.
Kind Regards,
Tricia Reinken