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I've spent 12 years in adtech and built 3 ad platforms from the ground up. Fingerprinting is used everywhere. It's a wide spectrum from basic metrics to very i

I've spent 12 years in adtech and built 3 ad platforms from the ground up. Fingerprinting is used everywhere. It's a wide spectrum from basic metrics to very in-depth tracking, all depending on the scale, latency and functionality of each scenario. This can range from frequency capping to fraud detection to stopping bots, to uniquely identifying devices. I will say that it's mostly used to improve UX by increasing security and limiting spam/bots/fraud but that doesn't mean its not used to track devices and people, although it's sold as targeted ad campaigns rather than specifically following individuals.

legitster 4y ago
How does a fingerprint remain stable over any reasonable period of time? How do you distinguish between different user accounts on the same device? How do you tie a fingerprint to your database of existing customers? How do you keep cookie data from conflicting with fingerprint data? I have yet to ever see a database of fingerprints or what it even looks like. It could very well be that advertisers keep it as part of a secret black-box, but every vendor we have ever used has been entirely dependent on cookies and the only data we've ever collected has been cookie or session-based. I've been sold a lot of garbage adtech over the years, so my hunch was that this was another bit of industry vaporware.
- manigandham 4y ago
  > "How does a fingerprint remain stable over any reasonable period of time?" Depends on how stable the signals being used are. Some can be very durable. > "How do you distinguish between different user accounts on the same device?" Fingerprints usually identify a device or specific user-agent. I'm not sure about the context for this but you can augment it with cookies to specify "user accounts". > "How do you tie a fingerprint to your database of existing customers?" How do you tie any random alphanumeric ID - whether stored as a cookie on device or recognized as a fingerprint - to a customer? Mappings still exist and work the same way. > "How do you keep cookie data from conflicting with fingerprint data?" What would be the conflict? Ideally only one is used as the primary identifier and takes precedence.
  - legitster 4y ago
    > Depends on how stable the signals being used are. Some can be very durable. How so? We have even deprecated IP Addresses in our database as we found they no longer have any sort of day to day accuracy (too many devices jumping networks constantly) or there are too many shared IPs for work networks. It seems like most fingerprints are just IP address + random identifiers.

legitster 4y ago

How does a fingerprint remain stable over any reasonable period of time? How do you distinguish between different user accounts on the same device? How do you tie a fingerprint to your database of existing customers? How do you keep cookie data from conflicting with fingerprint data? I have yet to ever see a database of fingerprints or what it even looks like. It could very well be that advertisers keep it as part of a secret black-box, but every vendor we have ever used has been entirely dependent on cookies and the only data we've ever collected has been cookie or session-based. I've been sold a lot of garbage adtech over the years, so my hunch was that this was another bit of industry vaporware.

manigandham 4y ago
> "How does a fingerprint remain stable over any reasonable period of time?" Depends on how stable the signals being used are. Some can be very durable. > "How do you distinguish between different user accounts on the same device?" Fingerprints usually identify a device or specific user-agent. I'm not sure about the context for this but you can augment it with cookies to specify "user accounts". > "How do you tie a fingerprint to your database of existing customers?" How do you tie any random alphanumeric ID - whether stored as a cookie on device or recognized as a fingerprint - to a customer? Mappings still exist and work the same way. > "How do you keep cookie data from conflicting with fingerprint data?" What would be the conflict? Ideally only one is used as the primary identifier and takes precedence.
- legitster 4y ago
  > Depends on how stable the signals being used are. Some can be very durable. How so? We have even deprecated IP Addresses in our database as we found they no longer have any sort of day to day accuracy (too many devices jumping networks constantly) or there are too many shared IPs for work networks. It seems like most fingerprints are just IP address + random identifiers.