DocumentationAudience ManagerAudience Manager User Guide

IP Address Obfuscation

Last update: Tue Apr 04 2023 00:00:00 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time)

Use this feature to obfuscate IP addresses collected in Audience Manager.

Overview and Methodology

Your company may desire to obfuscate IP address in many countries due to global privacy regulations. Audience Manager allows you to obfuscate visitor IP addresses on a global or country-by-country basis.

IP Obfuscation Methodology

Following the principles of “Privacy By Design”,Adobe Audience Manager allows customers to enable IP obfuscation from the UI, either globally across all geographic regions or for specific countries. When you enable this setting, the last octet (the last portion) of the IP address is immediately discarded when the IP address is ingested into Audience Manager. Audience Manager discards this part of the IP address prior to processing (including before any optional geographic lookup or logging of the IP address). For example:

  • Before obfuscation: 255.255.255.255
  • After obfuscation: 255.255.255.0

See also, Collecting IP addresses and IP Address Obfuscation in our Data Privacy section.

IP Obfuscation Precendence

Datastream-level IP obfuscation takes precedence over any IP obfuscation option set in Audience Manager, and it is applied to all IP addresses. Any geolocation lookup done by Audience Manager is impacted by the datastream-level IP obfuscation option. A geolocation lookup in Audience Manager, based on a fully obfuscated IP, will result in an unknown region and any segments based on the resulted geolocation data will not be realized.

IP Address Obfuscation Requirements

IP address obfuscation is available only to Audience Manager administrator accounts. See Create Users to understand how to assign administrator privileges for a user.

NOTE
Due to the large volume of data processed by Audience Manager, IP obfuscation changes can take up to 4 hours to come into effect, from the moment you update the settings.

Configure IP Address Obfuscation

Follow the steps below to configure IP address obfuscation.

  1. Log in to Audience Manager with an administrator account and go to Administration > Privacy.

  2. Choose the type of IP obfuscation that you want to use.

    1. Obfuscate all IP addresses: select this option to have Audience Manager obfuscate the last octet of all visitor IP addresses, regardless of the region they originate from.
    2. Obfuscate IP addresses for specific countries: select this option to have Audience Manager obfuscate the last octet of visitor IP addresses for specific countries. Use the List of Countries or the corresponding Search field to find the countries to enable IP obfuscation for, and click the + icon to add them to the Selected for Obfuscation list. Once you’ve added all the required countries to the Selected for Obfuscation list, click Save.

Disable IP Address Obfuscation

To disable IP address obfuscation globally, go to Administration > Privacy, select Do not obfuscate IP addresses, and click Save.

To disable IP address obfuscation for specific countries, find the countries in the Selected for Obfuscation list, then click their corresponding X icon. Click Save when you’re done.

https://video.tv.adobe.com/v/27218/

6586db601b0434ed2e627923