Abstract:
Different online systems, such as an ad system or a social networking system, maintain different identifiers. An ad system identifies an association between an unsynced cookie maintained by an ad system and a user of the online system. The ad system identifies an overlap IP sequence including multiple occurrences of a user's user id and multiple occurrences of an unsynced cookie id in communications associated with an IP address over a given time period. The ad system determines an overlap score based on the identified overlap IP sequence. The overlap score determines how closely the unsynced cookie is associated with the user of the online system. The ad system determines whether the unsynced cookie id and the user id are associated with one another based on the overlap score. The ad system stores an association between the unsynced cookie and the user of the online system thereby generating a synced cookie.