About

Why Verified Data? — by Brian Clifton

Privacy is in my DNA – it always has been, even when I was Head of Web Analytics for Google EMEA in the mid 2000s. It’s easy for website owners and marketers to say privacy is important. However, doing something about it, turns out to be a lot harder.

Hence, myself and a small dedicated team have built two tools that can independently audit and monitor a website’s data collection – providing detailed reports and alerts if things are not working as they should.

Verified Data tools ensure you keep on top of things BEFORE small problems become big issues.

• You can contact Brian at hello[at]verified-data.com
• Follow our Release Notes to keep up to date on progress.

We are corporate supporters of the Tim Berners Lee initiative ContractfortheWeb.org. An official data partner and contributor to the Ghostery project, and paying supporters of the NOYB.

Behind The Scenes (since 2010)

The team behind Verified Data is led by myself, Brian Clifton – former Head of Web Analytics at Google Europe and 4x best selling author. I have been auditing sites since 2010, with my audit method formally outlined in the book Successful Analytics (2015). This consolidated my thoughts and raised the obvious question: “Why don’t I build a tool to automate this?”

Building a tool to automate the entire process was initiated with the first release in September 2018. Since then, a lot of smart thinking and smart technology has gone into Verified Data. We integrate with Google’s powerful AI tool to detect personal data and the excellent Ghostery repository for detecting tracker and marketing pixels. Our cookie classifications is from our own proprietary database, for the simple reason I could not find any others that were good enough quality.