Internet Privacy Protection Company Offers Solution for Ad-Tracking, Snooping

The company’s eBlocker Family product, with parental controls, addresses recent concerns in the U.S. and in Europe about easily hackable connected toys, such as My Friend Cayla (see 1703220045), which makes voice recordings that can be shared with third parties without parents’ knowledge. An eBlocker chart of trackers from top children’s websites showed as many as 29 trackers from the high-traffic coolmath-games.com, Bennefeld said. “Those trackers can find out what’s the learning curve of my kid,” he said. Trackers can derive information about health and other personal data through children’s online behavior, he said. That kind of tracking is supposed to be protected by the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act in the U.S., but consumer and privacy advocates have criticized oversight.

Dynamic pricing is another privacy issue for consumers, said Bennefeld. In our demo, Bennefeld used a side-by-side comparison of search experiences on expedia.com for hotel pricing in Paris -- one on a PC and the second simulating a tablet -- to demonstrate how companies use dynamic pricing to steer preferred customers to certain destinations. Dynamic pricing also is used to discriminate on price based on a user profile and to compare prices to undercut competitors, he said. A search for the same dates at the Paris Marriott Opera Ambassador showed a price of $279 on the PC and $265, with a “mobile exclusive,” from the tablet. “Same search, different prices,” he said, determined by the website based on an algorithm. Sometimes browsing via iPad leads to a higher price, he said.

As we watched the real-time demo, the number of tracking sites continued to grow because “they constantly track my mouse movements,” Bennefeld said. Mouse movements reveal which information visitors look at on a website “even if we don’t click on a certain area." At one point, Expedia had 33 trackers, higher than the average of 18 per website, with trackers including Twitter, Google and Bing.

Some online retailers use customers’ location, which they get from the user’s IP address, and assign different online prices based on a user’s neighborhood, said Bennefeld. Even though the IP address is assigned dynamically by a customer’s internet provider, “those IP addresses can locate you to the neighborhood level,” he said.

Bennefeld pegged dynamic pricing engines alone as a $1.5 billion industry now, with some projections reaching $2.5 billion-$3 billion by 2020.

EBlocker uses data anonymization to disguise a user’s IP address and can even provide a new IP address from a different country, Bennefeld said. “We found out that, for example, if you book flights online, that getting an IP address from Israel gives you often the cheapest price while booking flights,” he said. Whether that could trigger unwanted scrutiny, Bennefeld said data anonymization is widespread and global. “Everybody does it.” He compared it to a virtual private network (VPN) used to connect to a virtual proxy server. The server reveals the IP address of the proxy “but not your real IP address,” he said.

Concern for data anonymization in the U.S. is on the upswing since the Congress’ recent scuttling of FCC privacy rules for ISPs. But consumers showed growing concern for privacy even before President Donald Trump signed the repeal earlier this month. A January IDC report (see 1701240013) said 84 percent of U.S. consumers surveyed expressed concern about their personal identifiable information security, and 70 percent were more concerned than a few years ago. Growing sensitivity to data exposure has consumers “on the verge of making serious changes in their behavior,” said the report. As technology becomes more integrated in people’s lives, and businesses and governments leverage data to provide services or sell products, individuals can feel "overly connected and may yearn for greater anonymity,” said analyst Sean Pike.

EBlocker prevents third-party trackers from accessing a user’s profile data, and can disguise a device’s “fingerprint" -- the user agents that trackers employ to identify browser type, operating system and type of device being used, Bennefeld said. The device plugs into a router via Ethernet cable and covers all connected devices on a home’s network including IoT devices and connected TVs, he said. A VPN, by contrast, has to be installed and can’t operate on a smart TV or game console, he said. Because eBlocker works on a network level, “We cover all the devices in the home network without any software installation,” he said.

EBlocker doesn’t block first-party cookies, which are used to store shopping cart items, said Bennefeld. “If you’re shopping on Amazon and come back a week later, your shopping cart is still there,” he said. “But we block all the third parties looking at your visitor behavior on how you’re acting online.” If a website doesn’t perform properly due to eBlocker, the user can “whitelist” the website or put the tracker on pause to gain access to a website’s content, he said.

The blocking device speeds browsing on an e-commerce site by up to 40 percent, said Bennefeld, because it prevents real-time bidding among advertisers for users’ profiles. “Different advertisers are bidding on us, and every advertiser has to submit their bid within 60 milliseconds,” he said. The highest bidder gets the ad placement, which is why ads follow users so doggedly around the Web. “If I’m looking for particular sports shoes, they try to put a high bid on me,” he said.

Bennefeld started eBlocker with $1.2 million and 17 years’ experience from the other side of the tracking business. He founded etracker, growing it to 90 employees, and remains a 50 percent owner. “Since I know how this data industry works, I had all these tools on the PC to protect myself,” he said. When he got his first iPad, he realized “I can’t protect myself on a tablet PC” and decided to do something to protect consumers from outside access on all their connected devices in the home. “I was pulled between retiring or founding something new” and decided to use his wealth of knowledge about data aggregation and data brokerage to “protect consumers from data brokers and collection.” Bennefeld likes to say the “etracker is paying the rent for the eBlocker,” but he's quick to point out that the former company doesn't abuse users’ privacy or compromise their user profiles, he said. The company, fully compliant with European Union data protection privacy regulations, looks for e-commerce bottlenecks and where shoppers drop out of the shopping process, he said.

The upstart eBlocker has sold 2,500 devices -- Pro ($219) and Family ($249) versions -- in the U.S. and is readying eBlocker Mobile software for installation on mobile devices. The software will connect mobile devices to a user’s eBlocker at home via an “encrypted tunnel” at no extra cost to the user, providing the same privacy preferences and protection level as when they’re at home. The first year of software updates for the eBlocker devices is free and then jumps to $59 for the Pro and $99 for the family version annually, said Bennefeld. The blockers support 10 devices simultaneously, he said.