What is Deanonymization?
At a simple level, deanonymization is the act of taking an anonymous user’s activity and using stored data to figure out who they are. This term most often pops up in discussions about ABM Platforms, typically framed as ‘on-site intent’. There’s two main ways that this can happen:
- That user is cookied by a service like Facebook and therefore can be recognized by that service on any site that’s using Facebook’s tracking code as the cookie is read by the service.
- That user’s IP address has been identified by a service that has then attached additional information to it, using that IP address as a unique identifier. Whenever that user lands on a site using that service’s tracking code, the service recognizes their IP address and can surface the stored information.
Cookie-based deanonymization is most common with platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google Ads, though you’ll also sometimes see it built into ABM tools.
IP-Based Deanonymization
Clearbit Reveal and ipinfo are two services that offer IP-based deanonymization. In Clearbit’s case, I’m fairly sure that when you deploy the tracking code onto your site it looks for form-fills and uses that data to progressively improve the IP-based dataset; each form submission adds more data to the profile attached to that IP address. This allows the product to both recognize that person when they return to that same site, deanonymizing that session, while simultaneously improving Clearbit’s ability to recognize that individual’s IP address when they visit other sites using the Reveal product. 6Sense’s solution works similarly as far as I know.
It’s worth noting that IP-based data took a major hit when the pandemic started, especially in the tech sector. As more employees started working from home, their IP addresses changed to those of their home networks. This temporarily broke a lot of IP-based tracking to a large degree. As of today (winter of 2022) this has mostly been ‘fixed’ as these people have been re-identified on their new IP addresses.
Written by Jack Segal. Shoot me an email with questions or comments, and if you'd like to support my writing, you can send me a tip using Stripe!
Date
2022-12-17Subscribe
Fill out the form to get notified whenever a new post goes live!