This Forbes piece was a fascinating insight into where tracking and targeting technology may be going. Cookies have become such a pervasive technology powering all kinds of tracking, personalisation and recommendation services including a healthy proportion of ad targeting on the web. When I used Ghostery I counted up to 30 third party tracking technologies being served into my browser from visits to some sites.
Cookies have proved to be a useful, valauble yet imperfect solution. Poor execution of retargeting, cookie blocking, mis-directed legislation have all shown the vulnerability of a technology that relies on dropping little pieces of code into browsers. Perhaps the biggest issue of all however is the inadequacy of cookies when it comes to mobile and tablet activity, potentially excluding a rapidly growing and already significant area of consumer activity.
So along comes so-called Fingerprinting – the practice of mapping the characteristics of devices across multiple data points to form a unique digital 'fingerprint' – as described in Forbes, who also note how the Electronic Frontier Foundation found that 94% of browsers that use Flash or Java had unique identities, and that you can also track changes to the set up. Startups like Tapad, similarly use a multitude of data points and say that they can track users across devices with 70-75% accuracy.
There can be little doubt that there will more efforts and investment in developing better cross-device identification and targeting technologies and services. But I wonder if some smart technology players might already be there, developing services based less on cookies, and more on joining-up data collected via the fact that you are logged into their services. The log-in might still prove to be the real power play here, and there are relatively few companies (Google, Twitter, Facebook, and now Amazon) that have been smart enough to develop a distributed presence broad enough to start making it really work. As ever, interesting times.
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