Is Visitor Tracking Violating Your Privacy Statement?
Visitor Tracking Could Violate Your Privacy Statement
Do you have a privacy statement? If so, you might be violating it with many visitor tracking programs. It’s important to ask your self, is visitor tracking violating your privacy statement? Make sure you know what you’re getting into and who you’re dealing with.
Here is how it works. Company A has a strong marketing effort. They get 1,000,000 people to “opt-in” by submitting a form. Visitor ID Company drops a cookie on the machine as part of the transaction, and tracks the behaviors of that party including visits so that it can create a better experience between Company A and the visitor.
Nothing wrong so far.
The trouble begins when Visitor ID Company wants to attract Company B. They offer Company B a 7 or 14 day trial and use Company A’s database to correlate unique visitor IPs to their database. Some have even been known to throw in “sample data” from a competitor’s traffic to show what could be achieved while the trial period is in progress.
Here are the problems:
- Company A has just helped its competitor
- Company A has breached its moral and legal obligations (in some cases) to its clients to protect their relationship
- Company B is wasting sales time pursuing fake leads or bad data entered by company A
- Visitor ID Company has mislead a prospect into buying results that are a representation of what could happen… under the guise that it just happened.
Long story short, you have just breached your customer’s data by working with a visitor tracking solution that shares data. The good news is that there are a limited number of companies that DO NOT share data. Those companies actually pull superior data for your sales team in the long term; because they don’t add the other company’s garbage (such as false records).
The downside, is that during a “trial” the company that is using gray-hat techniques will often seem to be a superior/easier to use solution. So, be careful when conducting your trial and make sure that the vendors you look at are willing to sign a privacy policy that matches the ones you give to your prospects and customers.
