Grapeshot maintains privacy for both the user and the publisher

Users are rightly concerned that their privacy is not invaded. Online user behaviour tracked by cookies is both anonymous and non-personal. But many organisations track cookies (users) across networks of sites, building a map of the URLs they visit to gain a broader pattern of understanding. Grapeshot serves the publisher and does not share the publisher's user data with any third party.

Most behavioural networks like to understand the different sites people visit across the internet. At a category level, you can be a sports user if you visit more sports websites than music sites: but this has the ugly need to track users, as cookie IDs, across websites. Often without users even knowing it. Grapeshot thinks this is an invasion of privacy.

Grapeshot helps publishers to track a user, but only within their own content and page views, under their existing Terms & Conditions with that one user. The user has one relationship with the publisher, and that must be maintained as a private relationship.

Grapeshot does not share data from one publisher installation with another publisher's installation. The data in each installation is private to the publisher and the user based on the publisher's specific terms & Conditions between their website and their users of their own content.

Similarly, if Grapeshot was to work with one advertiser, then the user data about who clicks on an ad campaign should belong to that one advertiser, and not be used as part of a wider network to track users unknowingly.

The network effect of tracking users is to compromise their privacy, so Grapeshot likes to work with one publisher or advertiser customer, and not use the audience data to help another customer or publisher. This is a totally different position compared to Google and other dominant internet companies that track users, by anonymous Cookie IDs across a range of websites and internet applications (eg search, email etc).

It is not only the website user who can feel his privacy is compromised by cross-network ad networks or behavioural targeting systems: it is the publisher as well.

It is not only the website user who can feel his privacy is compromised by cross-network ad networks or behavioural targeting systems: it is the publisher as well.

Grapeshot has heard publishers using Google and other network companies complain that they do not know how their own audience data is used by these third parties. These publishers fear they are leaking a lot of intelligence about their own audience out to other companies. Some feel there is a real value in owning their own audience data and creating niche channels within their inventory using Grapeshot as technology supplier that does not compromise their audience intelligence, but enhances it.

Grapeshot re-targets users based on keywords they have actually read on the publisher's site, or adjacent to ad slots that serve an ad campaign. There is no behavioural targeting across different parts of the internet. Grapeshot collects user profiles for the one publisher and empowers publishers to keep their own user data only to themselves.

Users can be assured that their cookie ID only collects a few keywords that no other party gets to see or use. Also the URLs any user visits on the publisher's website are not logged against the user. Grapeshot only collects the keywords for the Cookie ID, not the URLs which the user has visited.

So the information is both anonymous and private to the one organization with whom the user is interacting with over the internet, and with whom Grapeshot is partnering.

Users can opt out of the publisher or Grapeshot cookie by deleting cookies in their browser. There is no behavioural network being created by Grapeshot, as Grapeshot does not collect aggregate data around one Cookie ID visiting many different publishers' websites.

Grapeshot does not build such networks nor does it try and make secondary use of publisher's own audience data with any another publisher. Grapeshot likes to keep such data private, and can give users, based on the terms & Conditions a publisher elects to give, a chance to delete or kill their Grapeshot cookie for good.