But we are not in the business of taking the easy route out nor in the business of being one sided if we can innovate to solve it for both parties.
PrivDog is designed with Privacy of the user in mind. Our DNA is about securing the user and his/her privacy. Advertising is an area unfortunately filled with companies who are motivated with money and they don’t seem to care much about user’s privacy or security.
There are many legitimate publishers who provide great content and use advertising as means to support themselves. It simply is not fair to let them suffer because Advertising industry is not behaving themselves.
We could have easily developed an adblocker…its a simple product…but that would have wrecked the legitimate publishers who rely on advertising as an income.
Just not fair!
So after around 2 years of development and huge amount of innovation (maybe over 20 Patents pending) we were able to come up with an innovation that gave users Safety, Privacy, Speed of adblocking technology while not hurting the environment for publishers and still allowing them make money.
Its a win win for everyone!
And yes of course we will make money from this as well. Isn’t it great that the company whose DNA is about Your security makes more money so that they can continue to innovate and invest in products that make you safer! Its better than un-managed advertising companies making money out of you without caring for your security. Our base line is about your security first! Everything else is second.
Melih
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Introducing PrivDog
For over 15 years Comodo has had one single mission “Creating a Trusted Internet” (https://www.melih.com/2008/08/07/comodomelih-manifesto-why-i-am-doing-what-i-am-doing/). We’re always looking out for both businesses and consumers to ensure a rich, thriving business environment on the internet while offering free world-class consumer protection for free through programs such as Comodo Internet Security(https://www.comodo.com/home/internet-security/free-internet-security.php) (recently awarded a perfect score on AV test (http://www.av-test.org/en/tests/home-user/windows-xp/marapr-2013) along with the PC Mag editor’s choice award).
Comodo’s growing team is dedicated to building and finding solutions that protect users from all the latest threats while maintaining our standards of world-class user experience. Unlike the competitors we also offer these solutions for free to ensure they can be used by the largest audience possible.
In recent times we have found a significant increase in complaints of malware, intrusive tracking, and unwanted downloads driven through online advertising tactics. These lead to issues for both consumers and businesses as compromised user trust will inevitability lead to lower web traffic plus reductions in ad clicks and conversions.
There are various tools have come on the market to combat this including ad blockers, browser optimization tools, and even Comodo’s own secure browser product (http://browser.comodo.com). Some of these tools already block the ads that create harm for end users but are missing one critical piece. Simply put if you block ads entirely you kill the internet. And we here at Comodo aren’t interested in killing the internet, we just want you to trust it.
Increased adoption of ad blockers systematically destroys the eco-system that keeps the internet alive.
To further explain
1) Publications produce content for consumption online (i.e the Huffington Post)
2) They offer this content for free to end users to maximize their audience
3) The publication in turn makes revenue because other businesses want to gain exposure to this large audience to offer their goods and services though banner and text advertising
4) By blocking ads the publication is less incentivized to produce content, which in turn may lead them to paywall their site (charging consumers), which decreases traffic and eyeballs for businesses looking to gain exposure through online ads.
So basically by offering an ad block solution you do protect consumers from harmful ads and tracking but at the end of the day they are paying the bill to maintain the same internet they had before.
We believe in order for the internet to remain a trusted and profitable place to do business the world needs a tool that blocks all the bad but still keeps the eco-system alive.
That way
• Consumers still get free content
• Businesses still have a profitable channel to push their goods and services
• Content providers still have a way to earn revenue without charging consumers
And the best news today is we found the answer and it’s ready for you!
What is PrivDog?
Simply put PrivDog makes your internet browsing Faster/Safer/Private while still keeping the economy of the internet active and thriving. Consumers win, Publishers win, Advertisers win.
Faster
You’ll see internet content 50% faster or more by blocking the existing banner ads and replacing with safe trusted ads. Now your only problem will be what to do with all that new found free time.
Safer
No malware and unwanted downloads here, our friends on the AdTrustMedia compliance team strictly review all ad content prior to its release on the network. No more toolbars or other software clogging up your browsing experience with junk.
Private
PrivDog blocks all intrusive tracking cookies, pixels, and data collection. The uninvited guests are no longer coming in.
And here is another version explaining what Privdog is
Introducing PrivDog
PrivDog protects you as you browse the Internet by stopping websites including uninvited guests when you connect to their server, and unknown to you, connecting to other unknown servers.
You can download your copy of PrivDog here: http://download.cnet.com/PrivDog/3000-2144_4-75884663.html
Here are more detailed descriptions of the product from people who worked on it, starting with me.
Introducing PrivDog, a powerful mew privacy tool to compliment your Dragon’s existing privacy improvements.
Just like an AntiVirus treats files as viruses, PrivDog treats files on the internet as privacy and potential security risks. An AntiVirus program only allow safe files to run and similarly PrivDog prevents certain files from running in your browser.
As is well known, the best way to stay safe on the web is to only connect your computer to well known reputable sites, however, more and more there are security risks even doing that. When you visit a site, let’s say CNN.com, your intention was to only visit that site as you know it’s credibility, however, in reality sites like this use Advertising Networks to show advertisements. These Ad Networks often then deliver ads from other advertisers. This leads to a situation where your computer will unwittingly and unintentionally connect to several of the ever-increasing unknown ad servers. These are effectively uninvited guests to the CNN.com website and pose a security threat to your system. The content they show is decided dynamically at the time the ad is downloaded to your computer and is not vetted in advance by the web page authors of CNN.com and therefore cannot be considered to have the same level of trust and credibility. PrivDog ensures that only sanitized ads from a safe source are shown and prevents your computer from connecting to all these uninvited and unknown servers.
PrivDog is designed to protect your privacy but you can’t have real privacy without security. PrivDog goes further than regular privacy protection tools and ads a layer of security by blocking these potential threats.
An ever increasing problem seen on today’s websites is large, intrusive and CPU hungry advertisements. Many of these advertisements have large numbers of frames using up your bandwidth causing the website content you visited the site for to appear last and slowing down your browsing experience. The larger number of frames eats into your CPU time and slows down your browser and even effects other applications running on your computer and the speed of the operating system itself. More and more we are seeing large and intrusive full page pop-up ads appear inside pages stopping you dead in your tracks until you locate the tiny close button often deliberately hard to find. PrivDog sanitizes all your ads and prevents all these problems from occurring in the first place speeding up your system and improving your browsing experience.
Adobe Flash advertisements are prevalent on today’s websites. The use of Flash has come under ever increasing scrutiny from the computing industry due to is resource hungry and privacy breaching video. Flash advertisements use a lot of bandwidth and can be intrusive. In addition the use of Flash allows advertisers to employ the use of something called Flash cookies or supercookies. Many people today see super cookies as one of the web’s biggest threats to user privacy. Blocking or clearing your browser’s cookies will have no effect on super cookies. PrivDog prevents Flash advertisements from being shown and prevents these Flash cookies from being stored in the first place.
Ever seen those comment boxes below a photo from a new site, seems safe enough right? You may be surprised to hear many of these social comments boxes use technologies that track your movements around the internet and the data is used to profile you.”
Benefits of PrivDog:
Using PrivDog will give you the following benefits:
– Sanitized and safe advertisements.
– Blocks trackers and statistic.
– Protects your privacy by blocking 3rd Party Widgets
– Blocks 3rd Party Cookies