The Adtelligence platform is a software system that displays dynamic content on websites.
The website content can be created and managed in the software. Content allocation rules can also be defined, or the system uses algorithms to display the best content at all times.
The Adtelligence system is used to offer the visitor better usability on the website and to dynamically display the information that is relevant and appropriate to their situation.
To display relevant content, it is necessary for the system to recognize that a certain content has already been displayed to a visitor in order to present the same content or the same graphical representation to them when they visit the website again. In this way, the visitor is not confused by possibly changing content.
The Adtelligence system does not identify a natural person for this purpose, but always a web browser. The system does not know which natural person is behind the screen. No personal data is used for target group identification unless such data is explicitly sent to the system by the Adtelligence customer at runtime (e.g. CRM data). For tracking and identification, Adtelligence uses the open source web analysis system Matomo (formerly Piwik – https://matomo.org/), which has proven to be a secure system from a data protection point of view due to its privacy settings and local hosting (not a system hosted centrally in the USA as with other cloud services or American (web analysis) providers, but an individual Matomo instance per Adtelligence customer hosted by Adtelligence in Germany). The standard settings used by Adtelligence include the anonymization of the IP address and the recognition of a visitor primarily via cookies.
When a visitor comes into contact with the website for the first time with their browser, information is written to various cookies: Returning visitor cookie: randomized, anonymous ID that identifies the browser – not the person. Variant cookie: system-internal ID of the website variation seen in an anonymized hash in order to display the same variant to subsequent return visitors. The cookies are first-party cookies and are therefore stored under the domain of the customer’s website.
If a visitor returns to the website later, the system compares whether the browser already has the returner cookie and then displays the same content variant again using the variant cookie. If the visitor subsequently uses a different web browser or a different device, for example, the Adtelligence system can no longer identify them as the same person.
Only if a web browser cannot be recognized by cookies, e.g. because cookies are generally blocked by a browser setting, does the system ultimately attempt to use fingerprinting to recognize whether the web browser has already come into contact with the system on this website. For this purpose, an anonymous ID is generated as an MD5 hash, which is made up of various values: Operating system, browser name, browser version, browser language, plugins installed in the browser, masked IP address (masked to the first 6 digits, thus not uniquely assignable). Explicitly NOT used for the fingerprint: Browser history, system fonts, bookmarks. Furthermore, no other potentially questionable fingerprinting technologies (e.g. canvas fingerprinting) are used.
If a user explicitly prohibits tracking (DO-NOT-TRACK activated in the browser), no tracking is carried out by the Adtelligence systems.
In addition, the Adtelligence system has an opt-out procedure that allows every Internet user to specifically opt out of personalization by Adtelligence (https://acceleraid.ai/en/opt-out/). These visitors are then never tracked and therefore no longer appear in Adtelligence’s data storage.