As internet advertising company DoubleClick fends off a lawsuit for breach of privacy, most other companies that track internet users are keeping quiet. But Chicago's nCognito has stepped forward to claim it can provide accurate, detailed user profiling without violating privacy.
Like DoubleClick, Engage and others, nCognito uses "cookie" technology (see Say What?, page 16) to construct profiles, based on what people look at across a network of linked sites. To that is added demographic information such as age, education and income that is gathered when visitors register.
However, nCognito pledges that these will always be kept anonymous. Nobody will ever be able to correlate your online profile with any information that identifies you. And anyone can go to www.ncognito.com to check their profile.
Scott Olechowski, nCognito president, believes web sites can benefit from taking a proactive stance on privacy. "Our contract binds us and the participating sites never to append personally identifying data to the profiles unless people give specific consent."
So far nCognito, which launched last September, has signed up just 20 linked sites, including maxfootball.com, tennis.com, apartments.com and mycities.com. But it aims for 50-70 sites within the next few months and a database with millions of profiles.
However, so far the company has no revenue to bolster the VC funding it has received. At the moment, participating sites simply contribute user data.
Others, too, are taking a more aggressive pro-privacy stance. Real Media, an ad network rival to DoubleClick, is now promising to use "privacy proxies" - software gateways that allow site owners to target ads, but prevent the tracking of the users the ads are served to.
Meanwhile, AdSubtract.com has released a free, downloadable program that will block DoubleClick cookies.
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