The Role of IP Geolocation in E-commerce
Jonathan Tomek, VP R&D, Digital Element
In episode 86 of The Payments Show Podcast, I spoke to Jonathan Tomek who is the Vice President of Research & Development at Digital Element.
Digital Element empowers businesses to extract actionable insights from a consumer’s internet connection, leveraging their IP address. These insights encompass location, connection type, demographic data, VPN usage, and proxy details. By harnessing this data, businesses can enhance ad targeting precision, optimize content localization, and mitigate online fraud.
AUDIO VERSION: thepayments.show
Episode Highlights:
Not All VPNs Are Equal
… not every VPN is nefarious… not everybody is going to use it for fraud, etc. But a lot of people use them because they want to circumvent geo restrictions. We leverage and find as many different type of providers that exist out there so that we can actually monitor and see what's happening… we will dig into a little bit about who are they offering these services to, what are they trying to figure out, we, and then also what different regions they're allowing. Our goal is to figure out the integrity of an IP address so that we make sure that we're helping users rather than hindering them.
IP Characteristics
… we’re watching how IP addresses evolve over time. So for example, if your IP changes every day, all the time, you're not going to necessarily have the correct insight. Because nothing's static on the internet. Everything changes very dramatically. But with how we're collecting our data, we can say this IP address has been a school for this duration of time. But what happens if you saw the opposite side, which is an IP address that just constantly is bouncing around? It could be potentially used for different types of fraud, but maybe not!
Home Broadband
if you reboot your home router, you're more than likely going to have a brand-new IP address. I know that sounds funny, but it doesn't mean it's fraudulent. It doesn't mean it's nefarious, but what it can do though is it changes up how that demographic data is, but it also gives you a window of where the IP address range could be. Some IP addresses only stay within like the UK, but what happens if that IP address shifted to every different country around the world? That is some of the insights that we can give you, which is that IP address is something we should block probably pretty soon.
