Type Private Headquarters New York City Parent organization Evidon, Inc. | Website Official website Founded 2009 | |
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Industry Market intelligence
Compliance Founders Scott Meyer (CEO)
Colin O'Malley (former CSO)
Ed Kozek (CTO) | ||
Evidon (formerly Ghostery, Inc. and The Better Advertising Project) is a New York City-based company dealing in enterprise marketing analytics and compliance services.
It was previously the owner of the anti-tracking browser extension Ghostery, which it sold to the German, Mozilla-backed company Cliqz in February 2017.
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. Its goal was to develop a compliance system for AdChoices, a self-regulatory program for use of behavioral advertising by the online advertising industry. Better Advertising acquired the Ghostery browser extension from David Cancel in January 2009.
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.
In April 2014, Evidon was re-branded as Ghostery, Inc., unifying its branding with the consumer-oriented software. The company planned to increase its focus on enterprise-oriented solutions for digital experience management, managing cloud marketing, and managing privacy compliance.
On February 15, 2017 the Ghostery trademark, service and software was sold to Cliqz International GmbH a wholly owned subsidiary of Munich based Cliqz GmbH for an undisclosed amount. Ghostery preceedingly changed its name back to Evidon and made its software proprietary.
The new owner Cliqz intends to combine Ghostery's curated black-listing approach to blocking trackers with the non-curated heurstic approach developed by Cliqz, that can identify trackers and data points transmitted by trackers, that could potentially be used to identify a single person directly or indirectly, and also intends to integrate Ghostery with its developed Human Web Index in non-German speaking countries. The Human Web is a user-centric search engine that is built on privacy-by-design principles and in compliance with the strict Eurpean General Data Protection Regulation which comes into effect on May 25, 2018.
In an agreement between Cliqz and Evidon Inc., Evidon will receive non-personal data about trackers on the web from the opt-in feature already built into Ghostery for its B2B focused compliance business.
According to the sources, the name Ghostery will persist as the data protection and privacy component of the upcoming integrated product of Cliqz Search and Ghostery Anti-Tracking.