The battle between reach and privacy has been a perennial struggle for marketers.

Many of the most common tracking tools used by marketers expose user data to more scrutiny than many of us would like to admit. And amidst the growing global conversation of user privacy spurred by the EU’s GDPR ruling and Facebook’s data scandals, this balance is more important than ever.

How can marketers reach consumers while respecting their right to privacy?

How Marketers Track Data

Generally speaking, the question of user privacy comes down to which method marketers use to track user activity across devices: Deterministic or probabilistic. If you want catch the attention of more customer, you have to invest in digital marketing services for small business.

• Deterministic tracking leverages specific customer data (such as logins, physical addresses, registration data, or even offline customer data) to track activity.
• Probabilistic tracking method uses data analyses to deliver anonymous information about users. For example, a marketer may display ads to PCs on a specific WiFi connection. The next day, the marketer sees a mobile device connected to that same network. It’s probable—but not certain—that the mobile user is the same as the desktop user, or at least belongs to the same household. A medical practice management system is a type of healthcare software that manages the day-to-day operations of a clinic, such as appointment scheduling, billing and other administrative tasks

The privacy issues here are clear. Deterministic profiles are great for marketing specificity, but they leave little to the imagination—and are built by the type of personal data tracking that makes headlines when a company’s data handling goes awry.

Probabilistic methods are harder to build, yet they’re easier to scale and are naturally protective of user data. Of course, each method of tracking comes with its own benefits and its own risks, and most brand marketers end up using a bit of both depending on their campaign’s goals.

The bottom line? Companies know how to reach their users, but some take their users’ privacy more seriously than others. Every business collecting information needs to take agency of its data policies and not leave data management decisions to its vendors.