GDPR Consent checkbox depending on Country

[NStojkovski]

Hi! Hope someone might be able to advise regarding GDPR consent checkbox on forms. I would like to add a country field on all the forms that will update based on IP - as we know IP country is not 100% accurate and I would want to give the user the possibility to change it. Is this even possible? Can I show the user country field populated on a form?

After this a field that is gathering GDPR consent to be dependent on the countries selected on the country field. From what I see the GDPR consent is not a field that can be set as a dependent field, but what if I gather consent on another field and populate this field via a workflow? I would much appreciate any idea!

Many thanks!

[MCormack]

What you can do is not have the country field on the form and use a workflow to populate the coutry field by using a bunch of if thens.

eg if ip country is italy set country to italy else if ip country is etc... entry requirements to the workflow being ip country is known and country is unknown.

fill it our for the markets you are interested in.

It isn't perfect but it is like 90% 

obviously if you are doing multilingual marketing then this is more dangerous, but if you are just using the data to segementation it gets a lot further.

you can always have forms down the road that prepopulate the country field giving them the chance to change, but only show those forms to people who've already submitted a form / country is known.

If you really wanted to populate the country field at the first point of contact you'd have to ask for geo location priviledges and javascript the if thens on the page, or use an ip location service and populate on the fly that way. again with the if thens in the page. I'm not sure if javascripting forms with dependant fields triggers the depandancy, I can't remember from when I last did it. easy to test though.

There are paid services to get that data, maybe free ones too, I didn't look hard at all.

EDIT here a link to a working javascript code that gives you country from ip from free APIs

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/391979/how-to-get-clients-ip-address-using-javascript

Of course that doesn't solve your actual problem which is getting the GDPR consent to run dynamically.

The thing with IP country is that it is a field that only gets populated once they have filled in at least one form, and I'm assuming your looking at first contacts here.

@karstenkoehler can the workflow be used to check the gdpr seperately? (I've not currently got access to the workflow tools since september and I know it isn't a normal field) if not then you could use the javascript that populates the country to change the value of the gdpr statement for different countries on the fly, one box many statements.

If you did that you might also want to record the text that they agreed to in a hidden form field, as you wouldn't be holding that information in the form field information in hubspot. Thats a legal question beyond me.

[NStojkovski]

Thank you Karsten!

[karstenkoehler · Accepted solution]

Hi @NStojkovski,

As far as I know it's not possible to prepopulate the Country/Region field based on IP country. The website visitors would have to manually select this.

Regarding your question on consent, it's either on or off. The GPDR options cannot be displayed dynamically. Keep in mind that there is no such thing as a general GDPR consent. Depending on the country, it's required to capture the consent into processing a contact's personal data and the consent into communicating with a contact (this is what HubSpot's subscriptions are referring to).

You could consider displaying different forms on different language versions of the same landing page. If that's not possible, I would recommend following the strictest guidelines on your form. I can't advise on what those would be (see disclaimer below) but usually, consent into communication cannot be required and must be a separate checkbox, consent into data processing can be another checkbox or implicit within the consent notice.

(This post does not constitute legal advice. When in doubt, always discuss with a legal professional.)

Let me know if you have any follow-up questions.

Hope this helps!