Consumer identity is a method that companies use to track trends of online purchases. Since consumers jump from one device to the next, leaving a trace of data from multiple sources (like social media accounts) marketers realized that they needed to be able to identify who a consumer is at all points in their journey.
There are now 2 different ways for companies to follow shopping trends:
1. Deterministic identification: which looks for personally identifiable information (PII), like a customer log-in, to confirm identity.
2. Probabilistic identification: which uses anonymous data points (i.e. does not contain PII), in conjunction with identity-matching algorithms and a cross-referencing database to detect a probable unique user across each device.