In the past few months, interest in our website privacy solutions has increased tremendously. One of the main drivers is the May 26, 2012 deadline for multinational and U.K.-based companies to comply with the EU Privacy Directive. We’re seeing a similar uptick from U.S. customers due to the emerging U.S. Do Not Track (DNT) standard, a set of government- and industry-endorsed best practices that U.S. websites will need to adopt in 2013. Overall we’re fielding more inquiries than usual about the data collection practices of third-party tags and ensuring compliance with internal privacy policies.

For a quick education on website privacy standards and their potential impact, check out our new infographic here.  Did you know that the top 50 U.S. websites install more than 3,000 tracking files on an average computer? And that if the U.S. adopts European-style privacy laws, the projected loss in revenue is $80 billion over five years?

Whatever the motivator, publishers and e-tailers are starting to realize that consumers want to control collection and sharing of online data, and that some form of legislation or voluntary controls will soon be in place. So website operators are educating themselves about the tags on their sites, the data those tags collect, and how to comply with visitor privacy requirements. We'd like to help them.

Announcing PrivacyDNT

Today, at the pii2012 conference in Seattle, Ensighten is announcing Ensighten PrivacyDNT. PrivacyDNT provides a super-simple and free way for website owners to:

• Identify all third-party tags on their websites
• Auto-categorize tags based on vendor data-sharing policies and their respective commitment to honor consumer Do Not Track preferences
• Re-categorize tags into “block for DNT” or “never blocked” lists
• Recognize site visitors who have activated “Do Not Track” in their browser and accordingly suppress the firing of specific tags during that visitor’s session.

PrivacyDNT is radical for Ensighten and for the web community. For us, it’s a very different product: it’s completely free, has no usage limits, and is a simple web service that requires no implementation assistance. It spreads the benefits of our global Tag Server Network to more websites, which is very exciting. Ensighten has spent the last three years building our own technology infrastructure optimized for hosting, controlling, and delivering JavaScript to high-volume websites.

We’re also excited because PrivacyDNT extends our existing partnership with PrivacyChoice. Jim Brock and his team have done an exceptional job of building a comprehensive database that categorizes third-party tags by their privacy-related practices. PrivacyChoice data has been powering our enterprise product, Ensighten Privacy, for over a year and we’re pleased to incorporate the same data into Ensighten PrivacyDNT.

Ensighten PrivacyDNT is important for the web community because it contributes a foundational piece of the framework required to make widespread adoption of the Do Not Track standard feasible. Without going too deep into the ongoing DNT standards development process, suffice to say that it primarily consists of a technical standard for browsers to indicate a consumer’s Do Not Track selection and an agreement (or rather a disagreement) in the interactive marketing industry about how this selection modifies data collection practices on websites. However, the standard does not address

1. How websites will detect a consumer’s Do Not Track selection, and more critically;
2. How websites will then block third-party tags that are not Do Not Track compliant.

Ensighten PrivacyDNT fills that gap.  A website can be DNT-enabled in minutes by deploying a single line of code on every page, sorting some tags in a simple interface, and flipping it on. It’s that simple. No need to move or modify existing tag code. No tag management system deployment. (And did we mention it’s free with unlimited usage - in terms of site traffic and number of domains supported and anything else you can think of?)

Right now we’re in limited beta with PrivacyDNT, getting customer feedback and putting on the final polish. We plan to expand the beta over the coming weeks and get a general release in place in June. We’ll let you know more details soon.