Episode Details

What's up everyone, today we have the pleasure of sitting down with Cara Caruso, CEO and co-founder of Sentinel Insights, and Dustin Taylor, counsel at Troutman Pepper Locke.

We'll cover:

• (00:00) - Cara-audio
• (00:53) - In This Episode
• (04:40) - 1 — Why Your Website Is Running More Tracking Tools Than You Know
• (08:17) - 2 — How a Plaintiff's Firm Turns Your Website Into a Lawsuit
• (17:55) - 3 — The ECPA Wave and the Privacy Policy That Sues You
• (20:53) - 4 — What Consent Drift Actually Looks Like
• (25:16) - 5 — Who Actually Owns Privacy Compliance
• (30:49) - 6 — The Business Case for Privacy-First Marketing
• (35:52) - 7 — What Marketing Ops Can Do About Privacy This Week
• (42:35) - 8 — Why Email Marketing Is the Next Privacy Lawsuit
• (48:04) - 9 — AI, Consent, and Being Forced to Delete Your Data
• (51:46) - 10 — Why Small Companies Get Privacy Lawsuits Too
• (58:42) - 11 — How to Decide What Deserves Your Energy

Summary: A privacy-software CEO and a litigation defense attorney walk into a podcast and proceed to scare every marketer in the room, in the most useful way possible. Cara Caruso has scanned over 10,000 websites and found nearly 90% of them non-compliant, while Dustin Taylor has defended more than 100 companies against the exact lawsuits that follow. Together they trace how a forgotten tag from three years ago becomes a seven-figure settlement, why your own privacy policy is the document most likely to sue you, and how one month of a broken cookie banner turns into 10,000 dollars per visitor. Then they flip the whole thing and make the case for why clean, consented data actually performs better. Stick around for the part where your email open rates might be illegal and the FTC makes companies delete four years of data.

About Cara Caruso and Dustin Taylor

Cara Caruso is the CEO and co-founder of Sentinel Insights, where she leads a platform that monitors websites in real time for consent violations and privacy exposure. Before starting the company she spent more than 25 years in data and martech, building and scaling teams across technology and financial services in both B2B and B2C. She pairs strategic planning with hands-on execution, and she's also a certified yoga instructor who has been known to bring a workshop into the office.

Dustin Taylor is counsel at Troutman Pepper Locke, where he defends companies at the intersection of privacy law and marketing technology. He's defended more than 100 companies in ad-tech privacy cases involving cookies, pixels, session replay, and website chat, secured dismissals at the pleading stage in federal court, and argued in California, New York, Florida, Texas, and New Jersey. He started out with an advertising degree before law school, which makes him fluent in the martech stack in a way most litigators never are. He also publishes monthly privacy litigation reports and tracks ECPA filings with AI.

Why Your Website Is Running More Tracking Tools Than You Know

Most marketing teams believe they have a clean inventory of what runs on their website. There's a tag manager, a cookie banner, a vendor list in a spreadsheet somewhere, and a general sense that someone signed off on all of it. Then someone actually scans the site, and the number comes back two, three, sometimes four times higher than anyone expected.

Cara has watched this play out thousands of times. Sentinel Insights has scanned over 10,000 websites in the past year, and the pattern barely changes from one company to the next. Nearly 90% of those sites are not compliant. Every new customer gets the same uncomfortable conversation on day one.

The gap between what a team thinks is running and what's actually firing comes from two places. The first is history. Somebody three years ago added a tag for a campaign that ended, then left the compa