December 18th-December 23rd

Below is a roundup of last week’s notable industry news, with summaries and our opinions. This is the last newsletter of 2024. We’ll try to keep it short and sweet so you can get on with your holiday festivities!

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Top Story 👁️ 

Google OKs the use of IP addresses by advertisers, reversing a key ad tech data policy 🔒
Source: Ad Age
December 20th, 2024

Summary: Maybe the IP address won't suffer the same fate as the third-party cookie and will survive after all. Google has reversed course on its long-time policy to restrict IP address sharing due to privacy concerns. Beginning in February, the company will allow advertisers to target ads and measure campaign performance using IP addresses. Google says the broader digital advertising ecosystem already uses IP addresses, especially on connected TVs, and privacy-preserving solutions such as trusted execution environments enable this data-sharing while protecting against re-identifying individual users. Companies can use IP addresses in combination with other data for fingerprinting, a practice that allows them to identify and track users or devices for ad targeting purposes.

It's hard for users to block fingerprinting or give consent for it, which has put the practice in regulators' crosshairs. The UK Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), which regulates data protection in Britain, called Google "irresponsible" for changing its policy to allow fingerprinting. The ICO says fingerprinting likely reduces consumer choice and control over how their personal data is collected. Google says it will discuss the policy change with the ICO.

Opinion:

Is the endpoint of the privacy movement IP address? Time will tell, of course, but it’s interesting to see one of the two big tech platforms (Apple being the other) backtracking on a privacy initiative for the first time. 

IP addresses are a critical bit of data for digital advertising identity solutions, especially when it comes to CTV, where other identifiers either don’t exist (e.g., cookies) or aren’t very useful (e.g., device IDs). Everyone (including us) has been talking about the impending demise of IP and how the industry is not equipped for it. But maybe we were premature in making that prediction?

Having clarity and finality around which identifiers and data are OK to use and which aren’t from a privacy perspective would be tremendously valuable. It would create clear guardrails around what will and won’t work in the future, and it would allow the industry to build truly “futureproof” solutions. Right now, we’re trapped in addressability purgatory and we’re building speculative solutions. 

In order to achieve “full” clarity, we still need to know:

1. What Apple’s privacy endpoint will be

2. What Google is going to do about third-party cookies and device IDs

3. What federal privacy law will look like in the US

4. What the fate of email-based IDs will be from a regulatory and platform perspective

We may never get to a point of true clarity and finality, as privacy may always be a moving target. That said, perhaps we are getting closer…

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That’s It For This Week 👋

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