New Software Protects Online Survey Harvest

New York-based Mktg, Inc. has launched a digital fingerprinting tool, Crop Duster, which aims to spot and remove 'professional respondents' to online surveys.

The software logs respondent machine characteristics prior to their completing a screener, flagging up those that appear multiple times for additional analysis. President Steven Gittelman, PhD says Crop Duster 'captures information on respondents who have professionalized the business of being a respondent'.

The company says all profiles are 'data based' - in accordance with industry and privacy standards, no personal information is gathered. Furthermore, the company says that because Crop Duster 'cannot be detected by potential respondents and does not work by the use of cookies or other customary tactics, there is no known way for repeat offenders to beat the system.' The tool is particularly recommended for situations where hard-to-get respondent quotas require survey firms to bring in sample from partner companies or sites, which it says 'increases dramatically' the likelihood of repeat participants.

Mktg, Inc. specializes in online and telephone data collection with a particular emphasis on understanding sampling issues. Web site (Flash with no HTML alternative) www.mktginc.com .

All articles 2006-23 written and edited by Mel Crowther and/or Nick Thomas, 2024- by Nick Thomas, unless otherwise stated.