Amazon has begun to restrict outside parties including advertisers and the ad tech companies who serve them from seeing IP addresses of users for its IMDb TV and Twitch streaming platforms, making it harder for them to target consumers and build profiles of them.
According to Ad Age, Amazon has begun stripping out user IP addresses from data it shares with outside parties on free, ad-supported streaming service IMDb TV and live-streaming service Twitch.
The move is similar to tactics employed by Apple, which has not only stopped sharing user internet protocol addresses, but also cookies and device IDs.
The changes make it difficult for advertisers and their vendors to know important things, like how many times an individual user has seen an ad.
“It could have a pretty wide impact,” says Tal Chalozin, chief technology officer at Innovid, a digital video ad tech platform, speaking to Ad Age. “If you’re a marketer looking to engage frequency capping, then you don’t know anything about the home, so it’s harder to do that. All parties are not getting as good of a result as they wanted. Marketers would like to see the data; tech providers rely on it to sell products; for media companies, it makes it harder for them to do targeting, they can’t release the most relevant ads.”
Amazon, of course, owns its own ad network, where it still can control things like frequency capping (how many times a user sees an ad) using the IP addresses it controls.
But Amazon insists the issue revolves around privacy.
The company has had policies in place for years that restrict access to information like IP addresses.
"Under our Appstore Advertising ID Policy, third-party apps that collect information about users’ behaviors in order to display interest-based ads must use the Amazon Advertising ID,” Amazon told Ad Age. “No other identifier or tracking method (e.g., Android ID or IP address) may be used. Customers can reset their Advertising ID or use the interest-based ads setting on their device to manage their advertising preferences.”
