The relevance of IP addresses in the tracking ecosystem [pdf]
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Re: The relevance of IP addresses in the tracking ecosystem [pdf]
#2from the abstract....
"In this paper, we study the stability of the public IP addresses a user device uses to communicate with our server. Over time, a same device communicates with our server using a set of distinct IP addresses, but we find that devices reuse some of their previous IP addresses for long periods of time. We call this IP address retention and, the duration for which an IP address is retained by a device, is named the IP address retention period. We present an analysis of 34,488 unique public IP addresses collected from 2,230 users over a period of 111 days and we show that IP addresses remain a prime vector for online tracking. 87 % of participants retain at least one IP address for more than a month and 45 % of ISPs in our dataset allow keeping the same IP address for more than 30 days."
Re: The relevance of IP addresses in the tracking ecosystem [pdf]
#3I suppose this only works if you combine IP with some other information, like username or browser fingerprint. Otherwise you could be tracking multiple 'users' at the same IP.
Re: The relevance of IP addresses in the tracking ecosystem [pdf]
#4I suppose this only works if you combine IP with some other information, like username or browser fingerprint. Otherwise you could be tracking multiple 'users' at the same IP.
The whole multiple-users-on-one-ipv4 thing always feels like it distracts from what a tracker's goal really is. It is definitely beyond sufficient identification and more than needed for a tracker to start targeting you with ads and what not.
In some ways the fact that IP only tracking is lossy but still good enough is something to be afraid of. It is easy to 'taint' an IP and your households behind-the-scenes profile over a google search by your guest using your wifi.
Re: The relevance of IP addresses in the tracking ecosystem [pdf]
#5I suppose this only works if you combine IP with some other information, like username or browser fingerprint. Otherwise you could be tracking multiple 'users' at the same IP.
The whole multiple-users-on-one-ipv4 thing always feels like it distracts from what a tracker's goal really is. It is definitely beyond sufficient identification and more than needed for a tracker to start targeting you with ads and what not. In some ways the fact that IP only tracking is lossy but still good enough is something to be afraid of. It is easy to 'taint' an IP and your households behind-the-scenes profil…
Advertising that is relevant to my wife probably isn't relevant to me, using IP is not good enough. The title and focus here is on user tracking, which is the goal I'm commenting about. Its quite common to have multiple users behind the same IP, those users and their actions may or may not be related (I have no idea what my co-workers might be doing for example but we share a static IP).
I honestly didn't follow your Google search/wifi example.
Re: The relevance of IP addresses in the tracking ecosystem [pdf]
#6The big conclusion to be drawn from this paper is that IP address tracking can be combined with client-side tracking techniques to perform reidentification.
Re: The relevance of IP addresses in the tracking ecosystem [pdf]
#7Earlier quoted context omitted.
The whole multiple-users-on-one-ipv4 thing always feels like it distracts from what a tracker's goal really is. It is definitely beyond sufficient identification and more than needed for a tracker to start targeting you with ads and what not. In some ways the fact that IP only tracking is lossy but still good enough is something to be afraid of. It is easy to 'taint' an IP and your households behind-the-scenes profil…
Advertising that is relevant to my wife probably isn't relevant to me, using IP is not good enough. The title and focus here is on user tracking , which is the goal I'm commenting about. Its quite common to have multiple users behind the same IP, those users and their actions may or may not be related (I have no idea what my co-workers might be doing for example but we share a static IP). I honestly didn't follow you…
"It's listening to me!"
and your spouse's typed in search queries
and your playstation
and your smart coffee machine
and alexa actually is
thats all without getting me started on the analytics networks in other apps sharing with the same data brokers between apps
Re: The relevance of IP addresses in the tracking ecosystem [pdf]
#8Earlier quoted context omitted.
The whole multiple-users-on-one-ipv4 thing always feels like it distracts from what a tracker's goal really is. It is definitely beyond sufficient identification and more than needed for a tracker to start targeting you with ads and what not. In some ways the fact that IP only tracking is lossy but still good enough is something to be afraid of. It is easy to 'taint' an IP and your households behind-the-scenes profil…
Advertising that is relevant to my wife probably isn't relevant to me, using IP is not good enough. The title and focus here is on user tracking , which is the goal I'm commenting about. Its quite common to have multiple users behind the same IP, those users and their actions may or may not be related (I have no idea what my co-workers might be doing for example but we share a static IP). I honestly didn't follow you…
> using IP is not good enough
Define "not good enough"(for who is it not good enough? for advertisers?).
I used to work on a project linking cookies together in anonymous profiles (for advertising), initially the plan was to separate household/individual profiles using different heuristics, but I think eventually it turned out that nobody cares that much - the advertisers just wanted a rough cross-device profile, not perfect accuracy. I mean sure, for marketing purposes (as well as engineering/ "performance" reasons) you needed figures to brag about accuracy and whatnot. But it's really really hard to get those figures right, and ultimately the thing that will convince advertisers is "using cross-device profile improved conversion rate by 10%"; everything else is a detail in comparison.
Re: The relevance of IP addresses in the tracking ecosystem [pdf]
#9Most users will at the very least use two IP addresses - home broadband and mobile SIM broadband.
Then you have wifi hotspots, friends wifi. The average user uses many IP's and not limited to the range of one ISP.
SO whilst you can fingerprint devices and usage patterns, the IP address will by itself be useless to identify such users, it may well augment a little but is no solution.
But then IPv4 shares many IP addresses across mobile and broadband users in various ways. Most do not have a fixed IP and even those that do, do not have a fixed IP upon their mobile data activities - unless they VPN into their home broadband. Though if they use service VPN offerings, then another layer of IP ranges.
So the potential towards false assertions based upon an IP and user usage may well trip up and fail. Imagine using an ISP with dynamic IP and the next user of that IP uses it for crime, well with some bad logging and aggressive association, you can mislabel somebody for a crime they did not commit.
Roll on IPv6 and with that, mobile carriers would of been the obvious benefit of that, yet I'm not aware of any progressing that in any timely manner and chug along using a pool of IPv4 and various tricks to make those cater for many.
Re: The relevance of IP addresses in the tracking ecosystem [pdf]
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
The whole multiple-users-on-one-ipv4 thing always feels like it distracts from what a tracker's goal really is. It is definitely beyond sufficient identification and more than needed for a tracker to start targeting you with ads and what not. In some ways the fact that IP only tracking is lossy but still good enough is something to be afraid of. It is easy to 'taint' an IP and your households behind-the-scenes profil…
Advertising that is relevant to my wife probably isn't relevant to me, using IP is not good enough. The title and focus here is on user tracking , which is the goal I'm commenting about. Its quite common to have multiple users behind the same IP, those users and their actions may or may not be related (I have no idea what my co-workers might be doing for example but we share a static IP). I honestly didn't follow you…
It's "good enough" because it's still better than ads that are not-targeted at all.