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Safecount bakes cookies for better privacy

By Michael Estrin

August 02, 2007

Safecount, an organization dedicated to improving transparency in digital media for consumers, publishers and researchers, announced its launch. Backed by Kantar, WPP's insight, information and consultancy arm, Safecount has developed a research platform that aims to give consumers greater control of their interactions and which will be available to the entire research community.

"Advertisers are embracing digital platforms in part because of the accountability and measurement opportunities they provide, but this requires the collection and use of consumer data," said Tom Kelly, Safecount COO. "By increasing transparency and creating mechanisms that allow consumers to actually see and control the data collected from them, Safecount provides a trusted platform to help create a better digital data ecosystem for consumers, publishers, advertisers and the research industry at large."

Privacy has been a buzzword of late, with search engines taking flack from privacy groups over data collection practices. The heat has forced Yahoo!, MSN and Google to adjust their data retention policies.

Safecount also has launched Veranda, a web research recruitment platform that makes live website data collection available to publishers.

"We've channeled input from about 100 major publishers to create Veranda in a way that is most useful to them," said Jeff Landi, Safecount executive director. "We hope to bring a new level of organization and understanding to live website data collection so that consumers aren't inundated with survey invite after invite now that there is a central platform providing a greater level of management and control."

 

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