Digital Fingerprinting Now Part of the Beacon Market Research Platform
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March 22, 2012 (PRLEAP.COM) Technology News
Decipher, a comprehensive market research services firm, now offers integrated digital fingerprinting of respondents through its market research platform, Beacon. Users of Beacon will no longer have to license separate software in order to ensure respondent validity and heighten the quality of collected data. This is the first time in the market research space that this important feature has been integrated into a research platform like Beacon, and at no cost to the user."Until now, researchers have had to license third party software for digital fingerprinting," said Kristin Luck, president of Decipher. "Decipher is the first research services and software firm to integrate this feature directly into its licensable software – fully integrated for users."
The new feature identifies characteristic components of each responding computer, uniquely identifying it by its resultant "fingerprint." This means that any particular survey cannot be taken multiple times by the same respondent. Respondents are tracked in three main ways, after which they are recorded or terminated based on this advanced tracking. Respondent machines are identified by:
1. A geolocation check which retrieves the country code programmatically, as well as full country name, city, region, postal code, latitude and longitude, area code and metro (DMA) zone.
2. Expanded web caching with greater stickiness, i.e. detectable on computer after clearing cache.
3. Machine fingerprinting which detects numerous non-personal machine data such as OS version, display settings, fonts and more and then applies an algorithm to determine if the machine is unique.
There are many benefits to this service for Beacon users. They will no longer need to perform a front-end sync with an outside service in order to ensure respondent quality, creating seamless ease-of-use. From a respondent standpoint, the machine fingerprinting is invisible and requires no downloads.
Beacon, which also recently added a new dashboard reporting function, offers built-in functionality for services clients and licensees to author their own surveys, quality control review tools, data cleaning, archiving and field monitoring.
About Decipher
A marketing research services provider, Decipher specializes in online survey programming, sampling, data collection and data reporting. Utilizing proprietary Web-based applications, Decipher integrates state-of-the-art technology with traditional research techniques. Decipher is all about uncovering opportunities in whatever territory is explored with clients. As a true partner, Decipher isn't interested in just data, but also about what that data represents for each client. The company focuses on technology and research systems that bring data to life, and in doing so, helps reveal how even seemingly small discoveries can yield meaningful insights.