Profile merging on ECID - what about sharing devices?

[stefanm38281801]

Hi,

bringing this topic back in attention. Mobile SDK (and Web SDK) are highly relying on the ECID as the primary identity. As long as a device (or multiple devices) are used by the same user, there's no real issue. Problems start to raise when a device - a desktop PC, a tablet - is shared along users, each using their own credentials for login.

From the "user" point of view, the user login can be seen as "personal" (i.e. unique for a user). But if the ECID for the device remains, the profiles will get merged based on the ECID, and thus linking these users together.

One option is to reset the identities upon a logout/login session - it's a valuable and working solution; SDK calls for this are available. This will generate a new (set of) ECID('s) with each "fresh" login - ensuring profiles will not merge on ECID, but will only merge on their login identities.

However, this will be the result after some time for these users that login on shared devices:

The only way to get rid of excessive identities (and unfortunately I'm afraid also data linked to these identities) is through the privacy API's. But it is not their goal to be used for the purpose of clean-up.

Anyone any thoughts on this, and if there are more elegant solutions?

Stefan

[maggod]

Hey Stefan,

"Me too"

I'm a bit surprised that more than 50 identities are supported meanwhile. Usually the profile stopped working once you reach 50 ECID's.

A possible solution could be to regularly query experience events with only ECIDs as the identity, find the associated (lets say) <customerid> and put the data into a another dataset with only the <customerid> as the identity. Potentially you could also filter at this point and get rid of certain events like "home page view" (which is hard to prevent as anonymous user before you login)
That may be possible with Query service. (?)

[Lokesh_Shivalingaiah]

Yea... this is definitely an issue as of now with Identity merge. One of the way we could try to handle this 

1. Dont enable ECID as the identity

2. Capture other primary ID like userId, email after login 

3. Merge all the events with that primary id with the profile

Definitely drawback would be that we will not be able to merge the events which were done anonymously. However, with this we will be avoiding merging many different profiles who uses the same device.

We can definitely think about other approaches based on the % of profiles that gets affected. 

[stefanm38281801 · Accepted solution]

Switching off ECID as an identity has other consequences according to Adobe technical staff, since ECID is used as the main identifier for most of the OOTB Adobe solutions. You might impact their proper working.

[sharatchandra]

Dont think it is possble to switch off ECID as identity in websdk implementation

[sharatchandra]

ECID is identity by default even if we do not mark it as identity.