ClearSight Launches Targeting Platform Tying IP Addresses To Offline Data

Clear Interactive

The start-up ClearSight Interactive on Monday launched a new behavioral targeting platform that is already raising eyebrows of privacy advocates.

The company, which has collected 40 million "sticky" IP addresses, says its new platform, dubbed ClearProfile, will allow marketers to target Web users based on the profiles associated with their specific neighborhoods.

For its platform, ClearSight obtains users' IP addresses from publishers, who themselves gather it from users when they register. Some of those IP addresses change regularly, or are from work addresses or public places, but others persist and can be tied to users' homes, ClearSight CEO Tom Alison says.

The company doesn't keep users' names or home addresses. But it ties users' "sticky" IP addresses to their neighborhoods (at the ZIP-code plus-four level), and appends offline market research data about those neighborhoods. Using that offline research, ClearSight says it can place IP addresses into marketing segments, including detailed medical, financial and political categories. Segments include categories like "Medical Conditions -- Impotence," "Political Affiliation -- Republican," and "Homeowners With Home Equity Loans."

ClearSight, which doesn't itself collect clickstream data, isn't appending any information about people's Web history with their IP addresses. But the company is working with the demand side platform LucidMedia, which offers marketers the ability to combine ClearSight's data with clickstream data that's stored on cookies.

Alison says that combining datasets could allow marketers to make more granular buys. For instance, he says, a marketer might know that a user has visited a Corvette site, but wouldn't necessarily know whether that person is a potential buyer. ClearSight's platform would allow marketers to avoid retargeting those users if their IP addresses show they aren't in a geographic area known for buying luxury sports cars, Alison says.

For now the company is still lining up marketers. "We are talking to a number of agencies and clients right now about testing the data," says Alison. "We're ready to go."

Alison says that users have opted in to the platform because they say they're willing to receive offers from third parties when they register with publishers. He also says the company honors opt-out requests and removes around 1 million people a month from its database. Alison declined to name any publishers he is working with, saying the company has signed confidentiality agreements.

Some privacy experts are questioning whether users truly "opt in" to ClearSight's use of their IP addresses simply by agreeing to receive promotions from publishers' affiliates.

"It strains the limits of sanity to think that someone with a straight face would claim that users have opted in to being labeled 'impotent,'" says Jules Polonetsky, co-chair and director of the think tank Future of Privacy Forum. "This appears to be exactly the kind of behavior that regulators want to see constrained."

Last month, Rep. Rick Boucher (D-Va.) floated a draft of a bill that would impose new requirements on companies that collect information about users, including IP addresses.

Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, adds that his organization plans to ask the Federal Trade Commission to examine ClearSight's practices.

Lee Tien, an attorney with the digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation, adds that ClearSight's initiative demonstrates that data is being shared with more people than Web users probably think. "As with most privacy issues, however, we can't see what they're doing with data about us," he says. "Accordingly, those who 'consented' may never know what they really permitted."

5 comments about "ClearSight Launches Targeting Platform Tying IP Addresses To Offline Data".
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  1. Jason Smith, June 28, 2010 at 10:39 p.m.

    Jules Polonetsky's comment here is kind of comical. Here's a guy who touts Facebook as one of his supporters in the drive for internet privacy and he's questioning a permission-based approach to BT.

    Somebody better let Mr. Polonetsky also know that one of his other noted supporters at Future of Privacy Forum, Nielsen, is doing something similar and and down to the individual level through its partnership with Exelate.

    http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/exelate-and-nielsen-align-to-bring-offline-household-level-data-into-exelates-targeting-exchange-87644852.html

    Despite Davis' consistent attacking attitude and typical hack job of behavioral targeting cpmpanies, if you read the facts she presents versus her baseless opinion derived through no industry experience, it sounds like the data approach is to identify geo-locations in a similar manner that Digital Element is doing with its NetAquity product line. It just appears ClearSight took the next step to add offline data at the Zip-4 rather than just sell the improved IP Location at Zip-4 level.

    http://www.marketingvox.com/netacuity-edge-serves-hyperlocal-ip-targeting-044750/

    It appears that Davis just doesn't understand how geo-locational targeting works. Perhaps it is time for MediaPost to consider re-positioning her into subject matter she may be able to grasp slightly better.

  2. Jim Brock from privacychoice, June 29, 2010 at 9:52 a.m.

    Whatever you think about the data collection methods used, one thing is clear -- the Clearsight opt-out experience is poor if not unintelligible for consumers.

    Why would you require the user to enter their email address simply to remove their IP address from further targeting? Why does the process it jump to a completely different domain and company name without any explanation?

    http://www.scribd.com/doc/32910762/Privacy-Checklist-for-Behavioral-Targeting-Draft-version-1-1

  3. Jeff Hayworth, June 29, 2010 at 9:56 a.m.

    Interesting take on privacy from a news publication who doesn't allow users privacy controls on their profile...but anywho.

    So Jules Polonetsky, Jeff Chester and Lee Tien, self-proclaimed expert privacy activists, are not familiar with the standard privacy policy language from just about every website that generates revenue through advertising on the web. After hearing these guys made comment on this company ClearSight, I decided I'd share some privacy policies with them:

    http://online.wsj.com/public/page/privacy_policy.html?mod=WSJ_footer

    http://www.latimes.com/services/site/la-privacy,0,3125046.story

    http://my.monster.com/privacy/fullstatement.aspx

    http://www.brides.com/services/privacypolicy

    http://www.classmates.com/cm/reg/privacy?dsource=pub|1032|overview|null|9358|3#s2

    Each of these companies note the information they collect (which includes IP Address in their logs) and that they share PII and non-PII about the user when the user consents for them to do so.

    So, I'm curious why Wendy Davis didn't ask these privacy advocates whether they were familiar with these well-known web properties privacy policies and this standard practice of collecting IP Address and the sharing of that non-PII information.

    Seems pretty black and white to me, but perhaps those details interfere with talking points.

    This company ClearSight notes that it doesn't collect or house any personal data, so how is this even remotely a privacy concern? It just doesn't seem to stop with these privacy activists in their efforts to generate donations through extremism in public venues. I would venture a guess they have never even spoken to this company and discussed their practices with them, but felt they had enough expertise on their practices to scrutinize them from a press release.

    BTW, when is Jules Polonetsky going to denounce the practices of his "supporters" AT&T and Facebook?

  4. Tim Daly, June 29, 2010 at 12:51 p.m.

    Jim, I appreciate your continued efforts to ensure the proper respect to consumer privacy, but as you and I discussed by phone back in September, the approach to utilizing cookies is an ineffective approach to opt-out that our industry needs to re-think because it is disingenuous to consumers given that they are opted back in after they delete their cookies. It is a flawed approach that we need to improve upon to ensure we respect consumer privacy and to do a better job, it requires that users submit personal details and unsubscribe users in a similar fashion to how they remove themselves from email promotions and onsite personalization. The industry needs to move towards a desktop application that ad networks and publishers must scrub against similar to the DNC list and it must contain more than just a cookie session ID.

    Additionally, we also discussed that given that ClearSight Interactive doesn’t collect any personally identifying information on any users and doesn’t utilize cookies to collect any non-personally identifying information, it is impossible for ClearSight Interactive to offer users an individual opt-out using a cookie because we simply know nothing about an individual user. ClearSight Interactive is an aggregator of third party Non-PII data that is used for the purposes of intelligent modeling that doesn’t use one shred of PII in its modeling efforts. Our proprietary modeling logic is comparative to those used by respected IP Address geo-location technologies, whom yourself and other privacy advocates have not deemed as problematic. The fact that ClearSight Interactive has taken an additional step in appending neighborhood cluster data directly versus licensing our data and letting the end-user append the very same neighborhood cluster data should not require ClearSight Interactive be held to a higher standard than practices that have been happening now for a few years on data provided every IP Address geo-location technology.

    Finally, as you pointed out, the opt-out page is hosted on a separate domain. This is for a specific reason, ClearSight Interactive does not want to receive any PII under any circumstances including opt-out details. All data we receive for modeling is rendered anonymous before we receive it and we as a company decided we will never accept any form of PII in our database. The data we host is warranted by our data providers as opted-in before it is rendered anonymous and our responsibility is to get the opt-out back to the data partners for them to suppress, rather than holding onto PII that we cannot opt-out given we have no data about the individual, nor any interaction, that we could possibly opt-out them out of. The purposes for collecting email, postal and telephone is to provide each data provider with multiple data points to suppress within their first party database before they render them anonymous and forward their non-PII to ClearSight Interactive for modeling at neighborhood block levels. The use of third-party opt out management services has been a standard in the industry since the passage of CAN-SPAM, and we believe that those involved in behavioral targeting efforts should follow effective opt-out management approaches similar to those that have arisen in the email marketing industry.

  5. Jules Polonetsky from Future of Privacy Forum, June 29, 2010 at 7:52 p.m.

    Folks, I am a supporter of behavioral targeting and spent many years shaping policy in this exact area on the corporate side. I think it is dead wrong to create online profiles in sensitive categories....impotency and a number of the other highly sensitive categories listed on the Clearsight page go beyond what the responsible players in the behavioral world do. By not drawing reasonable boundries you are risking blowing up your own industry. (yes, even without PII....and at zip plus 4 level). Yup, others are doing the same - I hear regularly from companies who are looking for guidance in deciding what categories are appropriate for targeting and I see the wide range of sensitive categories they are offered. The responsible companies draw the line at labeling users with the most sensitive health or sexual conditions.
    I would indeed welcome a look at the language shown to the users who "opt-in - having trouble understanding how this process qualifies as an opt-in. But perhaps this is due to my limitations as a "self proclaimed expert".

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