marriottinternationa.demdex.net: How Adobe Tracks Marriott Users

The tracker marriottinternationa.demdex.net is part of Adobe’s Demdex system, specifically tied to Marriott International’s digital properties. It monitors your activity on Marriott websites and apps, gathering data to create user profiles for advertising and analytics. This invasive tracking compromises your privacy, and here’s what you need to know about it.

What Is marriottinternationa.demdex.net?

This domain belongs to Adobe Audience Manager, a tool Marriott uses to track user interactions across its online platforms. It collects data on your behavior, device, and location to feed into marketing strategies and ad personalization. As Privacy Auditors, we want to highlight the depth of tracking this tool performs and its implications for your personal data.

Data It Collects

When you interact with Marriott’s digital services, this tracker captures:

• Geolocation: Derived from your IP address, approximating your location.
• IP Address: Identifies your network location, potentially linking to your identity.
• Browsing Behavior: Records pages visited, time spent, and navigation paths on Marriott sites.
• Click Data: Logs specific actions like clicking buttons or filling forms.
• User ID: Assigns a unique identifier to track your activities across sessions.
• Cookie IDs: Uses identifiers like the demdex cookie to follow you across the web.
• Device Information: Captures device type, model, and operating system.
• Browser Information: Notes browser type and version for unique fingerprinting.
• Session Data: Tracks timestamps and duration of your website visits.
• Referrer URLs: Records where you came from before visiting Marriott pages.
• Screen Resolution: Logs display size to build a unique device profile.

This comprehensive data collection creates a detailed picture of your online habits, which can be exploited for targeted marketing.

Who Gets Your Data?

Your information collected by this tracker is shared with several entities:

• Marriott International: Uses the data to tailor marketing and customer experiences.
• Adobe Marketing Cloud: Processes the information for broader analytics and advertising purposes.
• Third-party advertiser: Gets anonymized data to serve targeted ads based on your profile.
• Law enforcement agency: Adobe may share data like IP addresses in response to legal requests, as noted in their transparency practices.

How to Protect Yourself

At Privacy Auditors Institute, we aim to arm you with tools to safeguard your privacy. Here are steps to reduce or block tracking by marriottinternationa.demdex.net:

• Install Tracker Blockers: Use services like Privacy Auditor to block tracking scripts from this domain. Ensure your browser extensions are configured to stop trackers.
• Use a VPN: Hide your IP address with a VPN like Mullvad to prevent location tracking while browsing Marriott sites.
• Opt for Privacy Browsers: Browse with Firefox set to strict tracking protection or use Tor Browser for enhanced anonymity.
• Disable Cookies: Block third-party cookies in your browser settings to disrupt cross-site tracking by demdex cookies.
• Clear Data Regularly: Delete cookies and site data to limit persistent tracking across sessions.

Combining these measures offers the strongest defense against invasive trackers like this one.

Sources

The information provided is based on the following:

• Adobe Audience Manager Documentation: https://experienceleague.adobe.com/en/docs/audience-manager/user-guide/reference/demdex-calls
• Adobe Privacy Policy: https://www.adobe.com/privacy/policy.html
• Marriott Privacy Center: https://www.marriott.com/about/privacy.mi
• Tracker Profile for Demdex: https://reports.exodus-privacy.eu.org/en/trackers/40/

This is a legal disclaimer. All information is provided for educational purposes only.