Recruitment Marketing Public

You can now configure your career site to automatically respect Global Privacy Control (GPC) signals sent by a candidate's web browser. This is enabled through the Honour browser privacy signals option on a data protection rule, which now covers both Global Privacy Control and the older Do Not Track (DNT) signal.

What is Global Privacy Control?

Global Privacy Control (GPC) is an emerging privacy standard that lets people signal, directly from their web browser, that they do not want their personal information sold, shared, or used for tracking, marketing, or performance monitoring. Rather than responding to a cookie banner on every site they visit, a candidate sets their preference once in their browser (or a browser extension), and that preference is sent automatically to every site they browse.

In practice, GPC is an automated way of declining a typical cookie consent prompt. When a candidate has GPC switched on, their browser transmits an opt-out signal to your career site before any banner is shown.

GPC has moved from an emerging convention to a legally recognised opt-out mechanism in a number of jurisdictions. In the United States it is treated as a valid opt-out under the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA/CPRA) and under similar state laws including Colorado and Connecticut. California's "Opt Me Out Act" (AB 566) will further require major web browsers to include built-in GPC functionality from 1 January 2027, so the proportion of candidates arriving with an active signal is expected to grow. Organisations operating in these regions may be legally required to honour the signal.

GPC and Do Not Track

The platform has always supported Do Not Track (DNT), an older browser signal that asks websites not to track a visitor. DNT was never backed by regulation and websites were free to ignore it, so it has largely become a legacy signal. GPC was designed to address those shortcomings and now carries genuine legal weight in several regions.

The Honour browser privacy signals setting covers both signals. Where a candidate sends either a GPC or a DNT signal, your career site responds in the same way.

When does GPC take effect?

Your career site will honour a GPC signal when both of the following are true:

1. The candidate is using a web browser that supports GPC and has activated it.
2. The candidate is browsing a career site governed by a data protection rule that has Honour browser privacy signals switched on.

If either condition is not met, the site behaves as normal.

What happens when a signal is honoured

When a candidate arrives with an active GPC (or DNT) signal and the matching rule has the setting enabled:

• The cookie consent banner is not shown to the candidate.
• The site behaves as though the candidate had declined cookies.

As non-essential cookies are treated as declined, the platform's ability to track that candidate's behaviour is reduced, and less information is available to build their activity timeline. This is the intended outcome - the candidate has asked not to be tracked - but it is worth understanding the trade-off before enabling the setting.

How to enable it

The setting lives on each data protection rule, so you can apply it selectively.

1. From the side menu, under Company, click on Settings.
2. Under Web, click Data protection rules.
3. Edit the rule you want to change.
4. In the Browser cookies & tracking section, tick Honour browser privacy signals (Do Not Track & Global Privacy Control).
5. Save the rule.

When should you enable it?

As honouring these signals reduces tracking and the richness of the candidate activity timeline, we recommend enabling it only where it is genuinely needed - typically where you are subject to privacy legislation that requires it, or where you have made a deliberate decision to be more privacy-protective.

Where you do enable it, apply it on as restrictive a data protection rule as possible rather than as a blanket default, so that only the candidates who need this treatment receive it.

Further reading

For more on the standard itself, including which browsers and extensions support it, visit the Global Privacy Control official site.