Posts tagged Companies
Search Dot Com Challenges Other SEO Companies in the UK to Match Their Google … – Virtual-Strategy Magazine
Apr 27th
 Search Engine Roundtable |
Search Dot Com Challenges Other SEO Companies in the UK to Match Their Google …
Virtual-Strategy Magazine An entirely new pricing structure has been introduced at Searchdotcom for its SEO clients and customers. The cost structure of SEO work will now be on a results driven basis that aims to provide the best value SEO in the UK. Paul Lynch the founder and … Google's Over-Optimization Penalty an Evolution, Not Revolution Negative SEO – A New Cottage Industry SEO Tips for planning a winning offpage campaign |
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Here Are 20 Companies Who Sell Your Data (& How To Stop Them)
Apr 26th
Meet the data brokers. There’s a whole industry full of companies who make their money buying and selling our personal information. The FTC is working on busting this dark racket wide open, but in the meantime, they’re out there. Who are they? Can we stop them? Read on to find out.
What Are “Data Brokers?”
Data brokers scrape public information like names, home addresses and purchase histories, credit card activity and other such sensitive tidbits. Then they sell it. There is nothing at all to like about this. At best, they’re Spam-as-a-Service companies. At worst, they enable violent criminals.
It’s mostly marketers who are interested in this information, particularly people who do online targeting. But many of them just sell it to whoever wants it. Here’s a horrifying example of what any crazy person with a credit card can do with this information:
“My husband was killed in March 1987. The person who killed him was tried, and convicted in 1992. The defendant went to jail and was released last July after only serving 18 yrs out of a 25-life sentence. The defendant being savvy and enraged at being incarcerated has been using been [been]verified.com to try to find ‘me’.”
She goes on to write that BeenVerified.com, as well as “dozens of other companies,” never responded to her attempts to be removed from a database. BeenVerified is one of the most notorious and irresponsible of these companies. Here are many more examples of its sleaziness.
The Most-Wanted List
There are tons of data broker companies. Here’s a selection to give you a sense of the kinds of language these companies use to describe their products, namely us:
More Data Brokers:
- Intelius
- Zabasearch
- Archives
- PeopleLookup
- US Search
- PeopleFinders
- PeekYou
- PublicRecordsNow
- USA People Search
- Epsilon
- White Pages
- MyLife
- PIPL
- PeopleSmart
Acxiom- “The 21st Century Marketing Funnel” – “Clean Your List: our data hygiene services start at $25.”
RapLeaf – “Upload… your customers’ emails and instantly get age, gender, and more.” – Best part: it asks for your “work email address” before you can use the free trial service.
Spokeo – “Not your grandma’s phone book.” – Its listed use cases are “Find Friends,” “Find Family,” and “Identify Unknown Callers and Emails.” I wonder what else you could do with it?
PrivateEye – “Billions of Records At your fingertips” – “You don’t have to be a member! Just enter as much info as you have about the person you are trying to find and our People Search Engine will do the rest.”
Radaris – “Radaris is a powerful search engine geared specifically to help people find one another easily despite distance and time.”
And then there’s the infamous BeenVerified. Just read the whole disclaimer on the footer of the site:
Disclaimer: While we are constantly updating and refining our database and service, we do not represent or warrant that the results provided will be 100% accurate and up to date. BeenVerified is a database of publicly available sources of information aggregated for your convenience. BeenVerified does not provide private investigator services and this information should not be used for employment, tenant screening, or any FCRA related purposes. BeenVerified does not make any representation or warranty as to the character or the integrity of the person, business, or entity that is the subject of any search inquiry processed through our service. None of the above-featured companies either sponsor, endorse, or are in anyway affiliated with BeenVerified.
You get the idea.
What Can We Do About This?
On Monday, the FTC released a detailed report calling for Congress to act to give consumers control over the data these companies gather and sell. Sites are currently not required to delete your data upon request. While the government slowly churns toward possibly someday doing something about this, there are companies out there to help individuals delete these records.
SafeShepherd is one such company, which deserves specific mention because it does such a good job of explaining the problem it solves. Its basic service is free, and it will find your info, give you privacy alerts and request removal of basic records. You can also pay for a more thorough cleansing.
SafeShepherd stays on top of all the data brokers it can find (including all the ones listed above). On average, it finds customers’ info on 11 such sites.
Keep in mind, these sites don’t have to comply with removal requests. But there are way too many data brokers to contact them all yourself, and SafeShepherd will keep trying over and over again.
For a lasting solution, we’ll need legislation. U.S. citizens who want to require data brokers to delete records on request should contact their representatives.
Lead image via Shutterstock.
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Cheap SEO Packages – What do SEO companies mean when they say “Cheap”? – SubmitinME
Apr 18th
 SubmitinME |
Cheap SEO Packages – What do SEO companies mean when they say “Cheap”?
SubmitinME Same applies to the SEO services offered today. Marketers' use the word “Cheap” to highlight there services from the rest of the crowd. As you know, today there are countless numbers of SEO companies and almost all offering similar SEO and SMO services … SEO Company India, Profit By Search Launches New Local SEO Services Webmeliorate Offering Most Advanced and Most Recent SEO Service |
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What Companies Are Next on Facebook’s Shopping List?
Apr 12th
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg says Monday’s purchase of Instagram isn’t likely to be repeated, but Wall Street will beg to differ. As Ben Foster, vice president and digital strategist at Ketchum, notes, “Once a public company, there will be pressure for repeatable profit and revenue growth.”
With user growth slowing, one of the quickest ways for a publicly traded company to show quarterly growth is through mergers and acquisitions. We asked Foster and other experts what companies and types of companies would make sense as likely Facebook acquisition targets.
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What Crooks and Companies Learn When You Overshare on Facebook
Apr 12th
You have your birthday listed on your Facebook profile, and at some point you got caught up in the local banking movement and decided to become a fan of your local credit union. In the friends list you have highlighted your family members, including your mother, whose profile is searchable under both her married and maiden names.
The decision to include that information is the result of three seemingly harmless and unrelated, split-second decisions. And in many cases, it’s all an identity thief needs to empty out your checking account.
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HigherVisibility Recognized as One of the Top SEO Companies in the United States – Virtual-Strategy Magazine
Apr 5th
 Kitsap Peninsula Business Journal |
HigherVisibility Recognized as One of the Top SEO Companies in the United States
Virtual-Strategy Magazine The rankings of the SEO companies on the list are derived from an in-depth analysis of each firm, a comprehensive review of the work performed for their clients, and client interviews. Highervisibility was ranked by TOPSEOs for the first time in … Competitive SEO Analysis: Data, Creativity & Understanding the Competitive … The Best Search Engine Optimization Companies Ranked in Australia by topseos … Maximizing SEO for your business workshop set |
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Domestic Online Companies Lead Online Sales Growth in Australia – San Francisco Chronicle (press release)
Apr 4th
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Domestic Online Companies Lead Online Sales Growth in Australia
San Francisco Chronicle (press release) Digital Marketing Company Oracle Digital exerts more stringent efforts to help local entrepreneurs maximise the potential of their businesses to gain substantial profits online through their latest innovations in SEO. Perth, Western Australia (PRWEB) … Online Shopping Declared To Be Among the Top Growing Sectors in the Industry … |
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The Best SEO Companies Named in India by topseos.in for April 2012 – PR Web (press release)
Apr 4th
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The Best SEO Companies Named in India by topseos.in for April 2012
PR Web (press release) The independent authority on Search vendors in India, topseos.in, has released their list of the best SEO companies in India for April 2012. The independent authority on Search vendors, topseos.in, has released their list of the thirty best search … ROI.com.au Named Best Search Engine Optimisation Company by topseos.com.au for … |
View full post on SEO – Google News
FTC: Privacy Requirements May Be Relaxed for Small, Maybe Big Companies
Apr 2nd
It’s beginning to look a lot more like a “Consumer Privacy Bill of Suggestions” as the U.S. Federal Trade Commission today made recommendations about limiting the scope of any “Bill of Rights” emerging from the President’s suggestions last February 23rd. Already, the framework is being presented as voluntary criteria for businesses, rather than formal regulations.
But after reviewing some 450 public comments about the president’s proposed framework, FTC commissioners issued their recommendations (PDF available here). Among them was a suggestion that as long as a Web service tracked fewer than 5,000 customers per year, and was collecting non-sensitive information anyway, it may opt out of this voluntary compliance, in order to avoid the hardships that respecting privacy may impose upon small businesses.
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If You’re Small Enough, Perhaps We Can Trust You
“The preliminary report proposed that the privacy framework apply to all commercial entities that collect or use consumer data that can be reasonably linked to a specific consumer, computer, or other device,” reads the FTC report this morning. “To address concerns about undue burdens on small businesses, the final framework does not apply to companies that collect only non-sensitive data from fewer than 5,000 consumers a year, provided they do not share the data with third parties.”
The Commission acknowledged that many advocacy groups opposed the idea of exempting or excluding any organization of any size from participating in the privacy framework, as being too small to matter. But Commissioners then offered the hypothetical story of a company that might qualify as an exclusion: “a cash-only curb-side food truck business that offers to send messages announcing when it is in a given neighborhood to consumers who provide their e-mail addresses. As long as the food truck business does not share these e-mail addresses with third parties, the Commission believes that it need not provide privacy disclosures to its customers. This narrow exclusion acknowledges the need for flexibility for businesses that collect limited amounts of non-sensitive information. It also recognizes that some business practices create fewer potential risks to consumer information.”
On paper, that seems sensible enough: Do we really want the big hand of government imposing privacy policy regulations on every church fundraiser and company baseball team that has a newsletter sign-up page on its website? If we did business the same way as we did in 1990, perhaps not.
But that’s the problem: Small businesses don’t do business the same way. They use their iPads and their cloud apps to collect simple mailing lists – and in that regard, you might say they’re sharing personally identifiable data with third parties. And if the cloud is the problem, the cloud may also be the solution: Services that provide data collection apps that do comply with a privacy framework, may theoretically extend those protections and principles to those dozens or hundreds of folks whose email addresses get collected for the charity picnic. It is through the collection of data from those who collect data (from those who collect data) that these “big data” databases have gotten so big in the first place.
In its response this morning, the Center for Digital Democracy – which represents private Internet interests – very politely, very daftly, suggested that part of the problem the Obama Administration may be having with this issue is that it doesn’t know what it’s talking about.
In a portion of CDD’s statement headed, “Ensuring an Informed Discussion About the Digital Data Collection Landscape,” the group suggested that an independent reassessment of the current market in data collection be launched, with the goal of opening everyone’s eyes to realities such as the Web enabling big data to be collected from small sources.
“All of the participants should start from a level playing field, armed with a basic understanding of the dimensions and contours of the contemporary data collection system,” stated CDD. “As the Department of Commerce, FTC, and the European Union’s Article 29 Working Party recognize, the data collection ‘environment’ that has emerged is interconnected. One cannot easily choose a small piece of the puzzle (such as the ‘low-hanging fruit’ of mobile privacy) to tackle, because all types of data collection and analysis are intrinsically connected to the fundamental forces shaping privacy in the commercial digital era.”
Then when deciding what issues the final framework should cover from the cornucopia brought forth by the independent reassessment, CDD puts things a little less gently: “Stakeholders should decide the topics, not the Administration.”
As if to prove the CDD’s point, in the appendices of the report, the FTC presented a graph depicting all the players in the grand data collection scheme. But as though bedazzled by the colored lines, for no known reason – perhaps in commemoration of the architecture of the Los Angeles airport – the Commission created this illegible 3D projection of the graph to accompany the slightly more sensible 2D version (top).
If You’re Big Enough, Perhaps We Can Trust You
While the Commission was suggesting that many data-collecting entities would be too small to require any kind of regulation, including voluntary, at one point its report also implied that some entities may actually be too big. More specifically, it implied that certain corporations collect so much data that the effort required to make sense of it all for tracking purposes, exceeds the value of the information that could be extracted from doing so.
As the report reads, “Consumers, moreover, might have limited ability to block or control such tracking except by changing their operating system or browser. Thus, comprehensive tracking by any such large platform provider may raise serious privacy concerns. The Commission also recognizes that the use of cookies and social widgets to track consumers across unrelated Web sites may create similar privacy issues. However, while companies such as Google and Facebook are expanding their reach rapidly, they currently are not so widespread that they could track a consumer’s every movement across the Internet. Accordingly, although tracking by these entities warrants consumer choice, the Commission does not believe that such tracking currently raises the same level of privacy concerns as those entities that can comprehensively track all or virtually [all] of a consumer’s online activity.”
The Commission’s report terminated its discussion of the bigger players with the classic “It Remains to be Seen” close: “More work should be done to learn about the practices of all large platform providers, their technical capabilities with respect to consumer data, and their current and expected uses of such data.”
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Local SEO Company, Marketing Companies Partner to Win Major Contract – Albany Times Union
Apr 2nd
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Local SEO Company, Marketing Companies Partner to Win Major Contract
Albany Times Union RevBuilders Marketing, Brand Design, Northern Line and Sigma College unite to design new website and provide SEO marketing for EnviroSolutions Inc. In response to a need for a full-service, end-to-end marketing firm, a group of specialized firms, … |
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