C&R Launches Duplicate-Spotting Tool

In the US, full service agency Creative & Response Research Services (C&R) has launched a tool for real-time identification and removal of duplicate respondents from online surveys.

The launch follows other recent debuts for detection software. In December, MarketTools applied to patent its Survey Fraud Detection System, which automatically identifies and removes fraudulent responses from data sets; while last month, Greenfield Online added RelevantID to its patent pending Duplicate Response Detection (DRD) tool.

C&R's new DGID sample quality tool uses a proprietary approach that fingerprints individual computers when respondents connect to the firm's survey portal, and tags them with a digital ID tag, or DGID Tag, allowing them to be recognized and removed from the sample if they attempt to return. DGID can sense and remove duplicates from samples within a single project, across waves of tracking projects, or across multiple projects - independent of the sample sources being used.

The firm says that although the major online sample providers have made great strides in removing duplicates from their panels, each has control only over their own panel, and can remove only those fraudulent respondents who register using multiple identities; they cannot control respondents who register honestly with several panels.

'There has been much debate recently about how to remove unwanted respondents from online samples,' says Patrick Panzenboeck, C&R Partner, VP-IT, and principal developer of the DGID system. 'There has been some excellent work done by the computer security community on uniquely identifying individual computers, so we were able to build DGID on principles that have withstood scrutiny.'

Panzenboeck explains that all machine identification systems collect information from a user's computer, and then combine that information to construct a fingerprint. DGID technology creates a machine fingerprint by exploiting minute variations in every computer's hardware, and this cannot be affected by users, by the operating system of their computer, by the software that's installed, or by the way they connect to the Internet.

DGID and DGID Tag have also been incorporated into the firm's Panelator panel administration system, used to manage its own and its client-owned panels.

C&R, which has nearly 50 years of experience in providing custom-designed qualitative and quantitative research, is on the web at www.crresearch.com .

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

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