A telco ID is suddenly back on the agenda for publishers. On October 26, 2026, OS Data Solutions, the data business of German media group Ströer, said it had added Utiq's consent-based telco ID to its OSDX audience segments, and that those segments can now be activated through Active Agent, The Trade Desk and the Equativ curation platform. The news landed one week after Apple explained why Safari now blocks a group of identity companies, which makes this a good moment to understand what this kind of identifier is, how it reaches the bid stream and where it fits in your plan.
This guide stays vendor neutral. We explain how the technology works using the provider's own documentation, what was actually announced, how the Safari change differs, the consent questions you should ask and seven smart steps for evaluating any provider. We do not cite reach, match rate or lift figures, because none were published with the announcement.
Table of Contents
What a Telco ID Is and What It Is Not
A telco ID is an advertising identifier built from a signal supplied by a telecom operator, rather than from a cookie, an email address or a device fingerprint. Utiq, the company behind the ID in the Ströer announcement, describes a chain of steps that starts only after a visitor gives explicit consent on a website or app.
According to Utiq's technical documentation, its software makes a secure call to the visitor's network operator once consent is granted. The operator returns what Utiq calls a Network Signal that corresponds to the connection. Utiq says it has no means to identify the user from that signal and never shares it with any participating customer or website.
The Network Signal is then mapped to a random value Utiq calls a consentpass. From that value, two working identifiers are generated for the publisher or brand. The martechpass is controlled by the business it is issued to and stays persistent for 90 days from creation. It is meant for personalization and for building first party audiences on your own properties.
The second identifier, the adtechpass, is the one built for programmatic advertising. Utiq says it is dynamically encrypted, used only inside the ad tech ecosystem and refreshed every 48 hours. Its documented jobs are targeting and frequency capping when an impression is offered through an SSP to DSPs.
It is just as important to be clear about what it is not. It is not a login system, and nothing is generated without consent. Utiq's consent template adds that it first uses the visitor's IP address to check for a supported connection, and if there is none, Utiq is not activated. It also only works when the visitor is on a supported mobile or broadband connection from a participating operator. A visitor on an unsupported network simply does not get one.
Utiq was founded in 2023 and is backed by Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Telefónica and Vodafone, according to the Ströer release. The same release says Utiq currently operates in Germany, France, England, Spain and Italy. For a publisher whose readers are mostly in North America, that list matters more than any other detail in this article.
What Ströer and Utiq Announced
The announcement itself is narrow and specific. As Ströer's press release puts it, OS Data Solutions is expanding its OSDX audience solution to include Utiq's deterministic, consent-based ID infrastructure. Advertisers can now use selected OSDS audience segments supplemented by the Utiq ID in their digital campaigns.
The company frames the value in two stages. At the audience building stage, the stable ID lets interest and socio demographic signals that OSDS already collects be consolidated over a longer period and across multiple visits. Instead of a series of snapshots, a reader who engages with different topics at different points can be assigned to a segment more reliably.
At the activation stage, Ströer says the stability of the ID raises the likelihood of reaching people from an established segment again when the campaign is served, in supported browser and app environments. That is the company's own description of the benefit. It did not publish a number to quantify it, and neither will we.
On distribution, the release lists three routes that are live now: the DSPs Active Agent and The Trade Desk, plus the Equativ curation platform. A fourth route, the Adform DSP, is due from the start of next year. Tobias Emmer, managing director at OS Data Solutions, said Utiq supplements the company's database with a strong deterministic signal, which lets it merge relevant data points more reliably.
For context, OS Data Solutions was founded in June 2019. It combines Ströer's digital reach and first party data with partner data, including the PAYBACK panel, and its offering already included multi ID audiences, contextual targeting and geodata. The Utiq ID is an addition to that mix, not a replacement for it.
Why Identity Is Back on the Agenda
The timing is not a coincidence of the calendar alone. On October 19, 2026, Apple's WebKit team published a post explaining that, in its iOS, iPadOS, macOS and visionOS 27 releases, Safari and WebKit block network access to what it calls identity resolution infrastructure. We covered the early revenue effects in our guide to Safari ads after iOS 27.
The WebKit explanation is precise about its target. It describes third parties that invisibly collect an email address when someone logs in or signs up for a newsletter, send it to their servers, create a tracking ID permanently linked to that email and send the ID back to the page. Apple says the blocking is done at the domain level, so a vendor cannot get around it by changing the structure of a request.
Apple did not name any company. The only public list so far came from the industry side. TrackingDesk reported that in WebKit bug 324771, filed on September 21, an engineer at The Trade Desk listed nine domains that Safari 27 shipped on its block list, one of them a test entry. The reporter argued that adsrvr.org is an ad delivery domain, and on October 9 Apple marked the issue confirmed resolved in the 27.2 beta.
Apple's post also makes a broader point. Even when an identity graph only holds one company's data, Apple argues that a central third party resolver has a cross site and cross device tracking capability that each first party does not have on its own. At the same time, it says first party personalization is not tracking and is not what its technologies seek to prevent.
AdExchanger added more context on October 26. It pointed to a September academic paper from the New Jersey Institute of Technology, DeepSee.io and Adalytics showing how extended identifiers can reproduce persistent user level tracking without cookies, plus recent security research into ads used to deliver spyware. The industry mood around identity, in short, is cautious.
Here is the important caveat. Apple's post is about email based identity resolution. It says nothing about telecom network signals, and it names no vendors at all. A telecom signal is a different input, but we make no claim about how Safari or any other browser treats a given provider today or in the future. Test it yourself, the same way you would test any vendor.
How a Telco ID Reaches the Bid Stream
For most publishers, the practical question is plumbing. Utiq's documentation lists two main publisher integrations: the Prebid ID module and Google secure signals. Before anything can be sent to bidders, the publisher must load the Utiq script, the visitor must consent and be on an eligible connection, and the adtechpass must be present in the browser's local storage.
On Prebid, the requirements are specific. According to Utiq's integration guide, you need Prebid version 8.2 or higher with the Utiq user ID module enabled. If you run version 10.0 or higher with the storageControl module in strict mode, the documentation warns that Utiq IDs can be suppressed from bidding unless you are on version 10.8 or higher.
There is also a consent wrinkle that catches teams by surprise. Utiq is not a TCF vendor, so Prebid's GDPR enforcement module blocks it by default. The documentation tells publishers to add a vendor exception for the Utiq module, and explains that Utiq performs its own consent check outside TCF so that nothing is stored on the device without consent.
Some SSPs cannot yet decrypt the adtechpass. For them, Utiq offers the martechpass as an alternative signal, which needs Prebid 8.47 or higher and a separate module. The documentation suggests limiting which bidders receive it, so that this first party identifier is not forwarded on to DSPs. If a reseller runs Prebid inside a cross domain iframe, version 10.11 or higher is needed for the IDs to pass from the parent page.
One more operational detail is worth noting. Utiq says it supports multi connection identification, with re-identification retries every 10 minutes after the first successful identification, and its Prebid modules send the pass for only the latest identified connection. That matters for readers who move between Wi-Fi at home and mobile data on the commute.
Consent, Privacy and Trust Questions
Any identifier that touches a telecom account deserves careful handling, and the consent text is where a publisher's reputation is on the line. Utiq publishes template wording for publishers. It tells visitors that the telecom operator uses their IP address against internal data, such as a mobile number, without disclosing it, to create identifiers for each connection.
The template also asks the visitor to confirm that they are the telecom account holder or have permission from the account holder. That is a real ask of a reader, and you should decide whether your audience will understand it before you switch anything on.
The most important nuance concerns shared connections. Utiq's own wording says that if a connection is shared, which is typical for home broadband, the same identifiers are assigned to each consenting person on that connection, linking their browsing behaviour. In plain terms, a household can look like one profile. Buyers and editors should both know that.
The template also explains that the network identifier is created for each supported connection the visitor uses, now or later when they switch between mobile and broadband. Visitors can withdraw consent later through a privacy portal Utiq calls consenthub, which the company describes as a single click process.
None of this makes the approach good or bad on its own. It does mean that it has to be explained honestly in your consent flow and privacy policy, in language your readers can follow. If you would be uncomfortable explaining the shared connection point to a reader, that is a useful signal about fit.
How It Compares With Other Identity Approaches
Publishers already juggle several ways of making an impression meaningful to a buyer. It helps to put this approach beside them without declaring a winner. Our guide to cookieless advertising covers the wider landscape, and the table below sums up the differences using the sources in this article.
| Approach | Main input | Needs consent or login | Watch out for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Email based IDs | Email at login or sign up | Login or form entry | Safari 27 blocks some third party resolvers at the domain level |
| Telco ID | Signal from a telecom operator | Explicit consent and a supported connection | Available only in the countries the provider operates in; shared connections |
| Contextual | Page content | No personal identifier | No frequency capping across sites |
| Your first party data | Your own readers and subscribers | Your own consent terms | Scale is limited to your audience |
The point is not that any single row wins. Ströer itself describes the Utiq ID as one more component next to multi ID audiences, contextual targeting and geodata. That layered view is the sensible one for most publishers, and it is why we avoid any framing of a telco ID as a straight swap for older signals.
If you already sell audiences built from your own readers, our guide on how to monetize first party data is the right starting point. A telco ID, where available, is a way to carry that work into programmatic deals with a consented signal attached, not a substitute for knowing your audience.
7 Smart Steps for Evaluating a Telco ID
If a vendor, SSP or curator raises this kind of ID with you, these seven steps will keep the decision grounded in facts rather than in a sales deck.
1. Check where your readers actually are
Start with your analytics. Utiq currently operates in Germany, France, England, Spain and Italy, according to the Ströer release. If most of your traffic comes from elsewhere, the ID can only ever apply to a slice of it, so size that slice before anything else.
2. Read the consent flow as a reader would
Put the proposed consent wording in front of someone who does not work in ad tech. Ask whether they understand the telecom operator step, the account holder confirmation and the shared connection point. If they do not, rewrite it before launch.
3. Confirm your Prebid version and modules
Check that you meet the documented minimums: 8.2 for the adtechpass, 8.47 for the martechpass option and 10.8 if you use storageControl. Remember the TCF vendor exception, or your enforcement module will block the ID quietly.
4. Decide which pass goes where
The adtechpass is built for bidding. The martechpass is a first party identifier, and the documentation suggests limiting the bidders that receive it. Write down which partners get which signal, and why, before your developer touches the configuration.
5. Ask each SSP and curator the same questions
Can they decrypt the adtechpass? Which DSPs can bid on it today? How will deals that use it be labelled in reporting? The Ströer launch lists three live routes and one coming next year, so ask about dates, not promises.
6. Split your reporting by browser and connection
TrackingDesk advises reading email based match rates by browser, because a step down on Safari can reflect the browser rather than your audience. Apply the same discipline to any identity test so you can see where it is present and where it is not.
7. Package it honestly into deals
If the signal works for your audience, sell it as part of a clearly described package, for example a contextual and consented audience deal. Do not quote reach or lift numbers that your own tests have not produced.
Who Should Care Right Now
Publishers with large audiences in the five markets Utiq lists have the most immediate reason to look closely, especially if they already work with Ströer, Equativ or buyers on The Trade Desk and Active Agent. For them, the question is no longer theoretical. The OSDS integration gives buyers a live way to use it.
Publishers in North America and other regions should treat this as a signal to watch rather than a switch to flip. The bigger near term job is the one Apple has forced on everyone: knowing which identity vendors load on your pages, what they collect and how your revenue changes by browser. That work pays off whatever identifiers win next.
Either way, the lesson from this month is the same. Identity is shifting from invisible plumbing to a decision that publishers need to own, explain to readers and test with their own data. A telco ID is one more option on that list, with a clear consent model, a clear footprint and limits that deserve equal attention.