Ghostery, Inc.

Ghostery, Inc.
Private
Industry Online advertising
Display advertising
Internet privacy
Market intelligence
Founded 2009
Founders Scott Meyer (CEO)
Colin O'Malley (former CSO)
Ed Kozek (CTO)
Headquarters New York City, New York, United States
Website Official website

Ghostery, Inc. (formerly Evidon and The Better Advertising Project) is a software company headquartered in New York City, United States, with offices in Sandy, UT and London, UK. The company primarily develops software products and services oriented towards digital experience, internet privacy, and market intelligence. Ghostery is best known for making the Ghostery proprietary freeware privacy-related browser extension which is available on Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Internet Explorer, Opera, and Safari. They also have a mobile app available on iOS and Android. It enables users to easily detect and control online advertising and tracking technologies, which are objects embedded in a web page, invisible to the user, which allow collection of the user's browsing habits.

History

The company was founded in 2009 as The Better Advertising Project by Scott Meyer (former CEO and President of About.com), Ed Kozek (former VP of Engineering and Product at Right Media) and Colin O'Malley (former VP of Strategic Partnerships and Programs at TRUSTe), and financially backed by Warburg Pincus. The company's goal was to develop a compliance platform for the “self-regulatory” program behavioral advertising online, commonly known as the Ad Choices program.[1]

Better Advertising acquired the Ghostery browser extension from David Cancel in January 2009.[1]

In January 2011, the company re-branded as Evidon, a variation of the word "evident". Meyer argued that the previous name had made more sense in the past due to the experimental nature of its product, and that the company needed a more "clear" identity to reflect its professional operation.[2][3]

In April 2014, Evidon was re-branded as Ghostery, unifying its branding with the consumer-oriented app. The company planned to increase its focus on enterprise-oriented solutions for digital experience management and privacy compliance.[4][5]

Products and Services


Product category Products/Services
Consumer Digital Experience Browser Extension
Privacy Compliance Solutions Ad Notice (part of the Ad Choices program), Site Notice
Enterprise Digital Experience Management Ghostery MCM

Partnerships

IBM[6]
Intel[7]
Oracle[8]
Accenture
AppNexus
MediaMath
Adobe

Business Model

Ghostery has received criticism over its business model.[9] This consists of collecting data about third party trackers through their browser extension software after the user opts-in, and then selling it to businesses and brands to help them better understand the effect of 3rd party tags on their users.[10] According to Ghostery, this data is collected and used only after the user opts-in, giving Ghostery permission in order to make commercial products so brands, not advertisers, can improve the user experience of their customers on their websites.[11]

See also

References

  1. 1 2 "Behavioral Ad Regulation Startup Better Advertising Buys Tracking Tool Ghostery". 2010-01-19.
  2. ↑ "Better Advertising Becomes Evidon; CEO Meyer Discusses New VivaKi Agreement". Ad Exchanger. Retrieved 4 May 2014.
  3. ↑ "Web Privacy Self-Regulation Accelerates". Adweek. 13 January 2011. Retrieved 4 May 2014.
  4. ↑ "Seeing Opportunity With Data-Haunted Marketers, Evidon Changes Name to Ghostery". AdAge. 21 April 2014. Retrieved 4 May 2014.
  5. ↑ "Evidon Rebrands As Ghostery, Focuses On Enterprise Tools". Ad Exchanger. Retrieved 4 May 2014.
  6. ↑ "Ghostery MCM 2.0". IBM. 19 August 2015. Retrieved 8 October 2015.
  7. ↑ "Ghostery: A Web tracking blocker that actually helps the ad industry". Venture Beat. 31 July 2012. Retrieved 4 May 2014.
  8. ↑ "A Popular Ad Blocker Also Helps the Ad Industry". Technology Review. 17 June 2013. Retrieved 5 May 2014.
  9. ↑ "Sharing Data, but Not Happily". NY Times. 4 June 2015. Retrieved 9 November 2015.

External links

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