![]() ![]() We don’t make money doing that, and that would actually destroy our business model. If you’re tracking exactly which pages I’m visiting, that could potentially allow you to know enough about me that you could eventually identify me. GB: Well, I could see ExtremeTech readers being concerned with that. It won’t tell me the user who went from page to page, but it will tell me the technologies and third, fourth, fifth-parties residing on those pages. So, we can go to the subdomain, and see that users went from the landing page to the baseball page, and then to the Yankee’s page, and then I looked up A-Rod’s batting statistics. GB: When an anonymous user was on this website, and they hit this tracker, are you tracking specific pages, or just on the domain level? So, it reflects real user experience at an aggregated level. But it might be Criteo that I banged into, and it sends back to Ghostery that Criteo was on the site that I visited. ![]() If I’m in Ghostrank, and I go to - by the way Ziff is a big client of ours - and I run into Google AdSense, what is sent back to Ghostery is not that it was Todd Ruback who ran into Google Adsense, but that it was a Ghostery user And so it identifies a third-party that I collide with, and also the third-party’s tracking technology. TR: So, what’s being sent back to us is exactly what the technology is that the individual consumer is running into. GB: What, exactly, does Ghostrank track and transmit? So, long-winded answer to say we create a library about trackers, but never about individuals - never about the audience. Which, again, companies need to know for disclosure, and also for security controls that they can put in place. We are now able to show organizations any non-secure tracking on their secure pages. So, that’s basically it in five minutes or less.īut building on what I said, what organizations are also seeing now is that there is a security component to our tool. So they can impose good privacy governance. Not only the invisible tracking - those third-parties - but fourth, fifth, and sixth parties, and how they get on your websites, and how they’re all related, so they can make really accurate transparency disclosures. And this is the information that companies so much desire so they can see what’s going on in their websites. So, we can see across about 26 million websites that our go to. And from that, we’ve built this library of a couple thousand trackers as well as their tracking technology - the JavaScript, the tags, the cookies that they’re dropping. But what we do when you enter into this Ghostery community called Ghostrank, you’re allowing us to monitor those trackers who are following you. We don’t want to know if you’re a male, female, old, young, black, white, tall, short. We don’t want to know your email address. We never ask for personal information like “are you Grant?” or “are you Rebecca?” or “are you Todd?” We don’t want to know your name. And if someone says “yes,” then what they’re agreeing to is for us to monitor those third-parties that are tracking them on any given website. And when you download Ghostery, you’re asked if you’d like to be in this community. It’s a long ramp-up to “what is Ghostrank, and what does it do?” Where we took Ghostery one step further is we created this community of Ghostery users which we named Ghostrank. So, this was great from a consumer side, but it didn’t give companies the answer to “how do we know what is happening on our sites, and how is it all interrelated, so we can make good disclosures?” So that’s were I finally get to your answer. It reveals that invisible tracking by third-parties. But at its highest level, as the pointed out, what Ghostery does, the plug-in, it tells you who is tracking you on any given website. It’s got well over 40 million downloads, and it’s being downloaded at a rate of 5-6% per month. And now it’s the world’s most popular consumer privacy tool. And at the time we purchased it, six years ago, there were a couple hundred thousand downloads. So, that’s where we bought this plug-in called Ghostery. So, they started asking us “Can you tell us how to get this intelligence, so we can disclose, and comply with our obligations?” We very quickly saw from the market that organizations, to a large extent, didn’t know what was happening on their websites. But what we also saw very quickly is that while companies wanted to be transparent and give control, they actually didn’t know what to disclose. Very quickly, we saw that companies absolutely agreed with us, and recognized that they want to be transparent about their digital practices because it’s the right thing to do - as well as obligations. ![]()
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