Privacy management provider Evidon has acquired MobileScope, a tool that lets users determine whether information is being collected about them through mobile apps, the company said Wednesday. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Evidon learned about MobileScope – which was a beta product designed last year by privacy experts Ashkan Soltani, Aldo Cortesi and Dave Campbell – at the right time, according to Evidon CEO Scott Meyer.
“As we’ve developed Evidon Encompass, our web analytics platform, increasingly our clients have been asking ‘Can you analyze our mobile apps?’ We were able to do it manually to meet their needs initially, but MobileScope had put into place what we had envisioned,” Meyer told AdExchanger.
Approximately 100 clients had been testing the beta product, but ultimately the founders “got to the point where they said we either have to invest a lot of money in this, or sell it to an existing platform,” Meyer said. “We monitor about two million pages a week for big brands, so snapping on the ability to do the same for mobile apps was fairly straightforward for us.”
Encompass enables users to see the tracking technologies that exist across websites and trace their origins, since they are often redirected from one tracking company to another. In addition, Meyer added, Encompass provides “performance statistics around page loads, tag loads and the density of ads that have nothing to do with privacy per se, but are valuable” from a company’s perspective. Through the integration with MobileScope, users receive similar functions on mobile apps.
MobileScope complements Ghostery, a browser tool Evidon acquired three years ago, which notifies users when trackers like scripts and pixels are on a web page, allowing users to block those page elements. The integration into Encompass has already been completed, and MobileScope will be baked into a mobile version of Ghostery sometime next year, Meyer said.
The goal, he added, is to “provide companies with a comprehensive picture of their performance across all of their customer touch points.”
