Two weeks ago, it was disclosed
that private data pertaining to 50 million Facebook users was harvested
by the data analytics firm
Cambridge Analytica and
misused in an effort to influence the results of the 2016 elections in
the United States. The finding sparked investigations on both sides of
the Atlantic, with
the European Parliament going
after both Facebook and Cambridge Analytica for possible misdeeds and
the
U.S. Federal Trade Commission
(FTC) launching
a probe on whether Facebook violated a 2011 consent decree it reached
with the regulator pertaining the privacy of consumers.
The backlash against Facebook
also involved Mozilla's announcement of a new Firefox add-on, called
Facebook Container,
that isolates Facebook's sessions in the browser to decrease the amount
of data collected by the social media giant. But unfortunately, online
tracking also reached another level this week, with Adobe's 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 claims the Device Co-op
initiative will not disclose the user's identity to its members,
including any personal data, tackling today's biggest concerns regarding
user's privacy. Also, the company claims users can completely opt out
all of their devices from the service
here,
which will apply to all participating companies at once.
We are still to see if the
Adobe Device Co-op initiative will in fact mean less exposure of user's
personal data. After all, it is again another service based on tracking
people's every online move.