After two back to back data breach of Facebook and MyFitnessPal application, people frown their eye brows whenever they hear the word ‘track’. But Adobe is working on helping 60 companies to track people across devices. The tracking is nothing illegal or unethical, as the company says. The decision was made at the Adobe Summit in Las Vegas, The reason stated by Adobe is to understand the consumer purchase trends. Consumers nowadays have multiple devices by which they access the internet before making any purchase. Sometimes, a customer has as many as 5 devices. This behavior imposes a challenge for retailers, who thus fail to understand their marketing campaigns. They only depend on Facebook or Google. Nowadays, most users rely on Facebook and Google sign in as they require no hassle to remember multiple passwords and username. Hence, retailers want to analyze this data only.
What Adobe aims to do is to provide a platform agnostic solution that acts as a glue between the world’s biggest brands’ own data management platforms. The companies participating in Adobe’s project will provide Adobe with cryptographically hashed login IDs. How is it legal that Adobe is tracking devices? The answer is here- The cryptographically hashed login IDs along with HTTP header data will hide the customer’s identity.
Some important companies that are among the 60 companies are Subway, Sprint, NFL, Lenovo, Intel, Barnes & Noble, and Subaru. Preliminary research will allow Adobe to link 1.2 billion devices worldwide, based on the amount of accesses seen by current members. One important thing to mention here is that the company is currently collecting data of U.S. and Canada users only. Adobe has assured that under no circumstances, will the identities be revealed.
