Privacy Protection

Current landscape

Monetising data from individuals

Customer data — both anonymous and Personally Identifiable Information (PII) — has been collected for some time.

Many businesses invested in Data Management Platforms (DMPs) that collected and segmented user data. DMPs utilised third-party cookies to capture individuals’ information, enabling advertisers to better target and retarget people across the internet.

While vendors of DMP platforms benefited from data services, and businesses from improved audience reach, these practices fuelled growing privacy concerns. Individuals often felt they had not consented to data capture and had no control or awareness over how their data was being used.

To address this, browser and platform vendors introduced measures to limit data sharing and enhance privacy protection.

Third-party cookies and App Tracking Transparency

Browser and operating system vendors began protecting individuals’ data by restricting third-party tracking.

Apple led the way — blocking third-party cookies on Safari and Firefox — which immediately reduced visibility and targeting capabilities for businesses. Google will follow, with the removal of third-party cookies in Chrome expected in 2024.

Additionally, Apple’s App Tracking Transparency (ATT), introduced in 2021, aimed to prevent device tracking without user consent.

The result: businesses have experienced reduced audience reach, segmentation accuracy, personalisation, and conversion tracking — a significant impact across ~60% of mobile and ~25% of desktop traffic.

Privacy initiatives and cookie deprecation have also created an uneven playing field, taking control away from businesses, reducing revenue, and pushing some toward less secure data-tracking alternatives.

First-party data strategy

In response, many businesses have shifted focus to managing first-party data through Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) — centralising their own authenticated and anonymous user information.

While CDPs provide more control and compliance, they rely heavily on user authentication. Low authentication rates limit effectiveness, and strategies to increase logins often risk harming user experience.

Some businesses resort to fingerprinting, creating consistent identifiers from browser attributes or sessions. However, fingerprinting is probabilistic, opaque to users, and difficult to opt out of, raising ethical and legal concerns.

Sharing first-party data

To scale audiences and improve marketing performance, brands often engage in data-sharing arrangements using tools like data clean rooms.

These rely on hashed PII and similar techniques — which:

• Introduce privacy risks and potential vulnerabilities.
• Produce low match rates, reducing marketing effectiveness.
• Increase exposure to data breaches and regulatory penalties.

In many cases, sharing PII is unnecessary — as personalisation and advertising relevance can be achieved without compromising user data.

A better future

The AdFixus Platform offers a frictionless, decentralised, and consumer-centric solution that balances business needs with individual privacy.

Our platform securely stores identity information within the consumer’s browser — deterministic and decentralised by design — ensuring that no one (not even AdFixus) can decrypt or misuse it.

By leveraging blockchain-based encryption, the platform eliminates the risk of centralised data breaches.

Most importantly, individuals remain in control, with the ability to opt out fully or partially at any time.

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