imarker - commercial SORM-like web analytics already with your provider

Do you use provider Acado, TTK, Rostelecom, Er-Telecom, NetByNet or qwerty? Have a website and seen requests with IP 92.242.35.54 and User-Agent WebIndex? You may be interested to learn more about your provider and imarker.

What is it about?

The above listed providers are connected to the “targeted advertising” service imarker , to which they mirror the traffic coming from the user. They mirror not only the link itself, but at least all the headers to the remote HTTP server. As they themselves say, they handle 38 million ISP subscribers.


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As soon as they receive traffic from the user, they follow the link that the user has just followed, and probably analyze the data from the page. The transition occurs literally instantly (usually up to 0.5 seconds), information is cached for about a day.

Here is what they write (from the Privacy Policy ):

1. Information provided by imarker
You are not required to provide any personal information to imarker. Imarker is not responsible for the illegal use of your personal information by others.

2. You agree that we may process information obtained during your interaction with websites on the Internet:
When you visit any website on the Internet, our servers automatically receive certain information, such as: visited URLs, URLs of sources of your referrals, your IP address, type and language of your browser, date and time visits This information can be processed to generate a “list of interests” (see below), which can be used to display personalized online content and advertisements. After processing, the original information is deleted: imarker does not store your history.
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D) Use of user information
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7. Imarker never reviews interest lists and other system data, but we reserve the right to do so in order to maintain imarker’s legitimate rights and interests, such as identifying, preventing and resolving issues related to fraud or security, or eliminating serious system issues. problems. In this case, the investigation will be limited to a specific purpose for a limited time, you will not be identified and any copy of the data will be deleted after the investigation is completed.
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E) Protection of personal information of minors
For imarker, it is important to protect the personal information of minors. If you are under the age of 18, you must obtain the consent of your parents or your legal guardian to use imarker products and / or services.

The following information they provided in personal correspondence :

The service allows you to determine the social, demographic and geographical characteristics of Internet users and provides advertisers with the opportunity to use this data to conduct targeted advertising campaigns in an intuitive interface. [...]
Behavioral targeting:
• advertising based on user search queries in ALL popular search engines (who searched for “TV”),
• advertising taking into account the interests of users, built on the basis of the categories of sites visited (who loves “sport”).
Geo-targeting:
• showing advertisements to users down to the street and at home (who “lives on Mira Street”).
Socio-demographic targeting:
• sex and age of the subscriber, social status, children
Role-Based Behavior Targeting (under development):
• “Parent”, “Manager”, “Student”, “Housewife”, “Entrepreneur”, etc.

On the basis of contracts with operators providing Internet access, the service collects anonymous data about users by mirroring their traffic (for those who do not understand it - MIRRULING TRAFFIC! COPY TRAFFIC, LIKE SORM - approx. Sporaw). Then software (the company's own development) analyzes the data to determine the characteristics of the user. In the future, when such a user enters the partner sites of the service, they will be shown those ad units that match its characteristics and settings, which the advertiser has determined in his advertising campaign.

The project launched, commercial sales began in August 2011

Imarker determiner

I made a script that determines the presence of imarker with your provider:
http://imarker.valdikss.org.ru/
The point is this: when opening a page, the script generates a unique link and redirects it. Next comes a 3 second wait for imarker to follow this link. If the transition was made, the user is displayed information about it.

findings

The conclusions are disappointing. Frankly, I did not even imagine that you can go so far. Even if you leave the legislative issues, such a system can greatly prevent, for example, at the time of launching the script-update database to a new version, or something similar, which is designed to run in one thread and does not put any restart restrictors.
According to information from sporaw, imarker is now owned by a foreign company Phorm .
So it goes.

Continuation of article - Statistics of use of imarker

Links

Information from LJ sporaw
Question from November 26 on toster , sql.ru , yaplakal and cyberforum
Firefox addon that detects and suppresses Phorm. Works with imarker, because he is also part of phorm.
The Phorm article from The-Village

UPD (02/10/2016) : It seems that imarker has sunk into oblivion (but Phorm itself is alive and well), as far as I know, the providers with whom it stood removed it. The web site for verification has broken, and now it does not make sense to restore it. However, large operators are introducing new systems that will be harder to detect. I will write about it if I find out the details.