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Adobe Is Helping Some 60 Companies Track People Across Devices (neowin.net)
Neowin reports of Adobe's recent announcement of its new Marketing Cloud Device Co-op initiative: The announcement of the new solution for tracking customers across devices was made at the Adobe Summit this week in Las Vegas to a digital marketing conference. According to an Adobe blog post released earlier this month citing Forrester, consumers are increasingly accessing multiple devices before making a purchase decision -- an average of 5.5 connected devices per person. This behavior creates a challenge for retailers, who cannot easily target people in their marketing campaigns, ultimately depending on Facebook or Google to track people instead of devices. Both Facebook and Google are able to do this job because of the massive amount of users logged into their ecosystems regularly, so most retailers have been opting to use those platforms as a way to reach potential customers. But Adobe's approach is to provide a platform agnostic solution acting as a glue between the world's biggest brands' own data management platforms.
In order for Device Co-op to work, each company that has joined the initiative will provide Adobe with "cryptographically hashed login IDs" and HTTP header data, which Adobe claims will completely hide the customer's identity. This data will be used to create groups of devices used by the same person or household, which will then be made available to all the members of the initiative so they can target people on different devices, instead of creating one customer profile per device, as can be seen from the example given in the image above. Until now, some 60 companies have joined the Adobe initiative, including brands such as Subway, Sprint, NFL, Lenovo, Intel, Barnes & Noble, and Subaru. Also, preliminary measurements made by Adobe indicate that Device Co-op could link up to 1.2 billion devices worldwide, based on the amount of accesses seen by current members. But it is important to note that the initiative is currently collecting data of U.S. and Canada users only. Adobe is claiming the initiative will not disclose a user's identity to its members, including any personal data, but, given the recent Facebook and Cambridge Analytica scandal, many will be skeptical of those claims. Thankfully, Adobe is allowing users to completely opt out all of their devices from the services via this website.
In order for Device Co-op to work, each company that has joined the initiative will provide Adobe with "cryptographically hashed login IDs" and HTTP header data, which Adobe claims will completely hide the customer's identity. This data will be used to create groups of devices used by the same person or household, which will then be made available to all the members of the initiative so they can target people on different devices, instead of creating one customer profile per device, as can be seen from the example given in the image above. Until now, some 60 companies have joined the Adobe initiative, including brands such as Subway, Sprint, NFL, Lenovo, Intel, Barnes & Noble, and Subaru. Also, preliminary measurements made by Adobe indicate that Device Co-op could link up to 1.2 billion devices worldwide, based on the amount of accesses seen by current members. But it is important to note that the initiative is currently collecting data of U.S. and Canada users only. Adobe is claiming the initiative will not disclose a user's identity to its members, including any personal data, but, given the recent Facebook and Cambridge Analytica scandal, many will be skeptical of those claims. Thankfully, Adobe is allowing users to completely opt out all of their devices from the services via this website.
Installing software is so old school. A few years ago you had to deal with tracking scripts on websites. Now you have to deal with the primary sites selling/buying the site's profile of you to data collectors like Adobe. Avoiding Adobe doesn't nothing to stop this. The only way to avoid this type of stalking is to never visit those sites, but not a single one advertises to who they sell your data to and you can't check to see if they sell your data without first visiting the site. So fuck you says the marketing industry.
You can see another example in a current real estate trend. Most people have a home inspection before buying a house. Companies have been bribing home inspectors for their lists of clients. The companies offer to pay some of the inspector's licensing fees and provide gifts cards, free vacation trips, etc... The companies then take those lists and spam you with services related to home buying as well as spam the seller with services related to selling. You have no control over this because you have no control over what the inspector does with the data he's collected about you: your contact information, the house you looked at, and when you looked at it.
Another trend is in service bundling. Companies are trying to uberize everything. Did you get an ad for a home warranty when you bought a house? Someone is paying your bank, realtor, inspector, etc... for that info (you can get it free publically, but that's after the sale goes through. If you pay for the data you can get it before the sale closes. Whoever sends you their ad first wins.) However, the company which send you the warranty ad doesn't even offer warranties. They're only a middleman. When they get a respond from you, they turn around and sell your data to whatever warranty company will pay the most for it. They do the same for everything else like roofing, cleaning services, etc... You pay to subscribe to their services, they pay 3rd parties for them to provide your contact info (for people who aren't directly subscribing), and they charge the contractors providing the services for giving them your request. Sign up, ask for snow cleaning, then they sell your request to the cheapest local contractor.
It used to be companies placed an ad in a public place and then you contacted the company directly. Now it's data hoarding companies buying and selling customer contacts as spam targets.
This violates GDPR. Any information is personal as soon as you can associate it with any other information about me, which distinguishes it as mine. So as soon as they know - this is the same user as that, they have my private information, regardless of name, birthdate presence. And more, as soon as I click on one such ads and buy some horse raddish, they combine some very personal identity info. When I buy something, I do not want them know of all my devices. I can only accept opt in, without bedsheets of smalfonted jura lingo. So, Adobe, you gonna get some lawsuits coming. Up to 5% of annual turnaround fines. Can't wait.