Recently, a decent number of customers emailed me about this change from Shopify - “Smart Data Protection”.

TL;DR: Shopify will soon change your default setting to pause data sharing on some of the pixels if they are not set up correctly or not tracking correctly.

Shopify’s CTO tweeted about this.

Where can you check your pixels?

Go to Shopify > Settings > Custom events. People who have worked with me then know that I always check this part of the settings to see what existing pixels or custom configurations you have.

What are the potential issues?

As some people pointed out on Twitter, first of all, Shopify will automatically change things without you knowing it. Second of all, there's not much documentation on how the optimization works from a technical perspective.

This lack of transparency is a little bit confusing, even for me, who lives and breathes pixel technologies on Shopify.

If you are unsure, you will have a choice to opt out. To opt out of optimized data sharing, you can adjust pixel settings in Settings > Customer events, and set pixels to ‘always on’ to maintain full data sharing at all times.

What's my educated guess from a technical perspective?

As long as the pixel is sending events to the server and responding to Shopify Purchase webhooks, and users haven't disabled/uninstalled it, it will be considered helpful.

My other guess is that PII is most likely to be restricted if there's a lack of permission, with the biggest impact potentially on Checkout and Purchase events:My other guess is PII is most likely to be restricted if lack of permission, with the biggest impact potentially on Checkout and Purchase events:

• email, phone, name
• address

Other data less likely to be restricted:

• IP, User-Agent

From the following documentation (https://community.shopify.dev/t/request-protected-customer-data-scopes-for-web-pixel-pii-access-before-december-10th-2025/25296), app developers will need to request certain permissions to get all the PII tracked.

Will this affect Aimerce? NO.

• Thanks to Aimerce Durable ID stitching and other such capabilities, we can intelligently track user information within legal compliance that protects user data privacy.
• Aimerce app is officially certified by Shopify and has the relevant data permissions (this refers to "Protected customer data access" - without it, you wouldn't see PII data in web pixel events.)

What are the action items?

If you're using Aimerce, then nothing; We will be responsible for handling all the compliance and tracking for you correctly.

If not, I would encourage you to take a look at your custom events in Shopify to see if there's anything that's: 1) Not being used. 2) Not implemented correctly.

Here to help you win! ✌️

-Yiqi