- More than 20M People around the World Use Ghostery to Make their Web Experience Transparent
- Downloads surging globally in past six months
NEW YORK – Evidon, the leading digital marketing intelligence company, announced that its Ghostery® unit, which provides the most popular transparency-enabling browser plug-in available to consumers online, has released its version 5.0. To celebrate this release, the new www.Ghostery.com website features an illustrative and engaging animated short that explains to the lay web user how online tracking actually works, and what they can do to manage it for themselves.
“GhostRank members report anonymous data in aggregate about the websites themselves, and the technologies collecting data from those websites, rather than data about individual users and their browsing preferences. This in turn becomes essential intelligence for any company doing business online.”
With version 5.0, Ghostery is being introduced to Android users who surf the mobile web using the Firefox browser. Millions of Ghostery users have already started using the new version, which enables more granular control over more than 1,600 tracking companies (the tracker database is the largest privacy library available). Other new Ghostery features include simple, click-to-play content controls, which enable users to specify how media should be played on a page without interrupting their browsing experience.
“Ghostery helps users easily detect tools that behavioral advertisers often use to track individuals across sites,” said US FTC Commissioner Maureen Ohlhausen in remarks to the Digital Advertising Alliance Summit on June 5. “Identifying these tools promotes transparency by giving consumers more information on the advertising practice of the sites they regularly visit,” said Ohlhausen.
More than half of all users downloading Ghostery opt-in to participate in the GhostRank™ panel. The panel is wholly comprised of Ghostery users who opt in to share with Evidon anonymous statistical data on the tracking code that they encounter across more than 26 million websites, and it passed ten million active monthly members over the summer. The GhostRank panel provides precise data to Evidon’s clients and informs clearer insights for journalists and analysts, leading to better understanding of the ecosystem and coverage such as this piece on Google’s dominance of the display ecosystem in today’s Advertising Age.
With recent news and events increasing privacy concerns, and increased awareness of the tracking ecosystem, Ghostery downloads have surged, and the GhostRank panel has grown along with it. The 10M+ user, opt-in panel is comprised of people from more than 100 countries around the world. Taken as a whole, the GhostRank panel enables Evidon to “track the trackers” and then demonstrate to companies the impact that all of that technology has on their businesses.
“GhostRank is the largest and most actively-refreshed panel of its kind ever developed,” said George Terhanian, Group Chief Strategy & Products Officer for Toluna and the former President, Global Solutions for Harris Interactive. While at Harris Interactive, Mr. Terhanian – a board member of the Advertising Research Federation – led the team that developed the panel and methodology for the Harris Poll Online, the first of its kind. “Evidon has inverted the usual panel model,” said Terhanian. “GhostRank members report anonymous data in aggregate about the websites themselves, and the technologies collecting data from those websites, rather than data about individual users and their browsing preferences. This in turn becomes essential intelligence for any company doing business online.”
Ghostery’s combination of best-in-breed privacy practices with a transparent business model is also unique; the plug-in isn’t used to upsell other products and is free, regardless of whether or not users decide to join the GhostRank panel. A wide range of professionals, from regulators and privacy advocates to attorneys and academics – as well as most of the reporters who cover data-related issues in the US and around the world – use Ghostery.
“Now, with more than 4,100 pieces of code from over 1,600 companies affecting website and app performance and user experiences around the world, the anonymous data from the GhostRank panel has become the core of our Evidon Labs services. With this level of insight into the business impact of these technologies, companies are leveraging Evidon Labs to make their websites faster and more secure, to choose partners more effectively, and to comply with privacy programs worldwide,” said Evidon CEO Scott Meyer.
About Evidon
Reveal the invisible web.
Evidon grows businesses by delivering new and accurate intelligence on how the digital marketplace really works. With unprecedented insight into the marketing technologies that underpin the commercial internet, brands, agencies, publishers and technologies make more informed decisions that guide their data strategies and drive better results.
Evidon technology includes Ghostery®, the industry-leading consumer transparency tool. More than ten million Ghostery users worldwide have opted-in to GhostRank—the largest panel of its kind. GhostRank reports on data collection across 26 million web and mobile properties, providing the proprietary business data behind Evidon Labs marketing intelligence solutions.
Evidon also provides market-leading privacy controls for more than $2 billion of display media and e-commerce transactions annually that empower more than 150 million people a day to control how their information is used online.
For more information, please visit: www.evidon.com.
