# Customer Data

> First-party personal information about a customer — email, phone, name, address — collected during a session or sent with a conversion, used to match the conversion to a real person.

Customer data is first-party personal information about a customer — email, phone, name, and address — collected during a session or sent with a [conversion](/glossary/conversion). It is the information ad platforms use to match a conversion to a real person, which is what lifts match rates and audience accuracy. In the wider industry, "customer data" is any data a business holds about its customers; in AnyTrack it specifically means the identity fields used for conversion matching.

## Customer Data vs Traits vs Session Enrichment

- [Traits](/glossary/traits) — the named parameters (`email`, `firstName`, `phone`, …) that carry customer data on an event; customer data is the underlying information.
- [Session Enrichment](/glossary/session-enrichment) — the process of attaching customer data to a session; customer data is the payload of that process.

## How AnyTrack handles customer data

AnyTrack operates as a first-party data processor: it collects customer data from forms, [event snippets](/glossary/event-snippet), webhooks, and catalog integrations, stores it securely for [session enrichment](/glossary/session-enrichment) and identity resolution, and hashes it with SHA-256 before sending to Meta CAPI, Google, or TikTok. It uses no third-party cookies and respects cookie-consent signals — when a visitor declines, first-party cookies are not set, though server-side conversion data can still be processed. Customer data is the single largest driver of [Event Match Quality](/glossary/event-match-quality).