MXO uses cookies to facilitate the collection of customer information for your organization, such as the devices they use, the products and services they interact with, and the ways in which they interact, for example, the website pages they visit and the online forms they complete.

The change in ITP 2.1 means that customers with an existing TID, who are using Safari and don't interact with a client website for over 7 days, are treated as anonymous until a customer identifier is recaptured. This mirrors the existing behavior in MXO for customers who intermittently clear their cookies. After a customer identifier is captured, the customer becomes recognised again and all recent anonymous behavior and captured attributes are included in their unified customer profile alongside all their historical information.

MXO 's great advantage is its existing, deterministic, identity matching, that already reduces the impact of the changes in ITP 2.1.

When a customer visits a web site or other Touchpoint, MXO assigns that customer a unique identifier, a TID, stored as a cookie in their browser. That TID allows MXO to recognise the customer across multiple visits to the same Touchpoint. A customer who visits multiple Touchpoints is assigned multiple TIDs (one per Touchpoint).

MXO uses a known, reliable, identifier; a Key, to link activity and data for a customer to a single customer profile. When a customer provides that key at a Touchpoint, for example, by logging in to their account, MXO can link the existing, multiple, TIDs together, associating them all with the same customer.

Because MXO currently uses cookies to store customer TIDs in the browser, we have added a fallback mechanism to store that same TID in localStorage, just in case the cookie expires.

The advantage to using localStorage is that it is not affected by the change in ITP 2.1 that sets client-side cookies to expire after 7 days of inactivity.

The disadvantage to using localStorage is that stores can only be read within a specific sub-domain (unlike cookies, that are available across an entire, specific, domain). For example, customers who visit a Touchpoint every 6 days, stand no risk of becoming anonymous. Customers who visit every 10 days are potentially at risk IF the Touchpoint spans multiple sub-domains AND their subsequent visits continuously touch multiple sub-domains.

For more information about TIDs, Keys, and how MXO manages customer identifiers, see:

• What is a Key?
• What is a TID?"
• MXO Customer Identifier Management