A first-party-centric marketplace will undoubtedly elevate the performance of those with the data, but there is a real danger that it will come at the expense of consumer choice and open markets. What we should not be doing is embracing a protectionist model that eliminates access to all third-party consumers and skews or removes consumer choice. If new brands and businesses can’t transparently identify prospects or prove that their investments are working, they will stop investing and may never even get started.
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Don’t get me wrong. This is not (yet another) plea for free third-party cookies. Our industry should be giving a uniform thumbs-up to data security, clean rooms, and the requirement to protect sensitive data. We should also endorse the use of public data and require consent. We should not abandon, but rather secure, our current identity framework by providing advertisers and consumers with a proper audit trail for the use of IDs.
An identity space that requires both an ID plus a timestamp for onboarding and media activation—secured through an opt-in process and coming with a systemic, assigned expiration date—would dramatically reduce the ability to reuse or abuse identity.
One inherent advantage of an IP address is that it is time-sensitive, systemically protecting users from unauthorized resale and abuse. On April 1, an IP-to-household assignment has a 40% chance of being unusable by May 1st and a near 100% chance of being unusable by June 1st. An IP address is also included and works in parallel with nearly all other forms of ID sharing—devices, emails and media platform IDs—making it fluid and ubiquitous. If an audience is opted-in, then syncing that secure audience with the media exposure by IP promotes full measurement of cross-platform campaign performance with 100% coverage—but only for that specific campaign and application.
So what if IP usage in the adtech ecosystem was encoded and included a “watermark” of a timestamp and the brand or data provider? An actual OpenID that is unusable except for the permissible purpose of a campaign would be better for the industry, the economy and consumer privacy.