Data Governance

Overview

Data Governance in Audience Manager refers to the lifecycle of your customer data in Audience Manager, and it encompasses Collecting and Obfuscating IP Addresses, Data Retention, and Cross-border Data Transfers.

Collecting IP Addresses and IP Address Obfuscation

The IP address of a visitor to a customer’s website is transmitted to an Adobe Data Processing Center (DPC) where the IP address may be stored. Depending on the network configuration for the visitor, the IP address may not necessarily represent the IP address of the visitor’s computer. For example, the IP address could be the external IP address of a Network Address Translation (NAT) firewall, HTTP proxy, or Internet gateway.

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:

Watch the video below to understand how IP address obfuscation works in Audience Manager.

Geographic Segmentation: If you enable IP address obfuscation, the remaining octets of the IP address can still be used for geo-segmentation and reporting in Audience Manager. If you do not enable IP address obfuscation, Audience Manager uses the full IP address. You can use the Geographic Segmentation feature that allows you to identify an IP location by geographic area in either case, but with some slight loss of precision when IP obfuscation is being used. Obtaining city-level information will likely be significantly impacted by the obfuscation of the IP address. Obtaining region and country-level information should only be slightly impacted. Geographic Segmentation data is granular only to the city level or postal code level, and not to the individual level. Read more about geo-targeting and how to set up traits with geographic variables.