Protecting the proprietary
Editor’s note: Fred Bullock is senior vice president of marketing at Alchemedia, a San Francisco provider of online security software.
The Internet is quickly becoming the medium of choice for today’s market research professionals. The Web offers several advantages over telephone or on-site market research studies. Researchers can enrich online surveys with images, text, and other information to add depth to the panelist’s survey experience. Panelists often prefer Web-based studies, where they can enjoy the conveniences of anonymity, interactivity, and speed.
The number of consumers willing to participate in telephone surveys is dropping steadily. Only 30 percent of potential panelists say they are willing to be contacted by phone. On-site surveys conducted in shopping malls and elsewhere can’t match the Web for convenience or privacy. And then there is cost: the Internet allows researchers to distribute hundreds or thousands of digital surveys instantaneously and at minimal expense compared to conventional methods.
While the benefits of online research are clear to research professionals, many of their clients are hesitant to commission online studies. Their concerns often focus on information security.
Security challenges for sensitive concepts
The drawbacks of communicating sensitive and proprietary information online are self-evident. The basic problem, in the words of PC Magazine, is that “the Internet is one big copying machine.” Web users can cut, copy, paste, save, or screen-capture images and text with a few keystrokes or clicks of the mouse. Even the inexperienced computer user can easily print sensitive information, and then redistribute that material to unauthorized viewers. Many prospective clients worry that posting sensitive product or design information on the Web amounts to little more than giving it away.
Hugh Davis, a technology executive at marketing research firm Greenfield Online, tells of his company’s experience in dealing with the information security problem: “As a marketing research company we had to turn away many projects because we had no way of guaranteeing that product images would not end up in the wrong hands. The last thing a client wanted was their prototype concept being passed around the Internet. However they still wanted to take advantage of the cost and time savings of conducting the research online.”
Watermarking solutions
The understanding that sensitive information in online surveys could end up in the hands of competitors or the media has compelled market research firms to search for solutions to the problem of online copying. The simplest among these - including scarring, embossing, watermarking, and thumbnails - attempt to discourage users from copying online data.
The practices of scarring and embossing work by degrading the appearance or quality of images. Both techniques involve superimposing an identifying (or in the case of scarring, simply a degrading) mark across the face of a digital image. Both render images useless for most commercial or educational purposes - including those necessary to conducting successful market research studies. Thumbnails can discourage panelists from passing along sensitive images to friends or colleagues; however they are simply too small to be of much value to panelists and can defeat the purpose of the survey.
Digital watermarking works by subtly encoding a copyright owner’s information into digital images. This method relies on enforcement of copyright rather than prevention of information theft. Even if a market research firm could locate images stolen out of its surveys - no small feat given the difficulty of mining the billions of images hosted on the Internet - it could do nothing to reverse the damage that exposure of this information may have already caused.
Software solutions
Due to the drawbacks inherent in watermarking, scarring, and other image-manipulation techniques, many research firms have tried to develop proprietary security tools. These solutions generally involve replacing images with bits of software code that trigger the display of specific information. Companies can use these applications to prevent end users from saving protected material.
Because their approach to protection focuses on proscribing user action rather than on preventing the replication of information in bytes or pixels, these proprietary applications cannot stop users from screen-capturing sensitive information. This represents a critical breach in security; one that most users can easily exploit with a few keystrokes, or by using third-party screen-capture software.
DRM solutions
In-house software solutions tend to be expensive to develop and easy for knowledgeable users to subvert. Many research firms have therefore experimented with the more robust security offered by digital rights management (DRM) software.
The idea behind DRM is to protect copyright and the exclusivity of information by limiting what people can do with it. The newest generation of DRM software allows companies to endow images and other information with policies that govern which individuals can view information and what they can do with it once they see it. Some DRM applications can prohibit users from printing or saving information, or can limit the number of times a user can open a specific file.
While DRM applications can protect companies against certain types of information theft, they are not ideal for protecting market research surveys. First of all, DRM solutions require substantial administrative oversight. Most work by combining encryption technology (to protect information in transit) with a digital key system that authenticates and establishes usage restrictions for each user. Each instance of protection involves setting a usage policy that can vary from file to file and from user to user. This need to micromanage usage makes DRM solutions cumbersome for both the company deploying them and the end user who has to negotiate them in order to access protected information. The amount of effort required on both sides makes DRM solutions ill-suited to the task of protecting individual surveys online.
Secure Display
Other solutions for protecting information in online surveys involve technologies that can inherently prevent the duplication and misuse of data. These applications fall within the category of Secure Display solutions.
Unlike DRM software, watermarking, thumbnails, and other methods, Secure Display software applies general rules for protecting information before it is served to the Web. The best Secure Display solutions prevent users from copying, printing, saving, and screen capturing information displayed within a Web browser. Because the level of security does not vary according to end-user or by specific usage policy, Secure Display protection is easy to implement and maintain, and requires minimal involvement on behalf of the end-user.
Currently several firms employ Secure Display software to prevent online information theft. As more firms successfully implement security for their surveys, clients who commission online research studies are starting to demand a higher level of protection for their information.