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Company Unmasks Anonymous Web Visitors For A Price. Then Shuts Down.

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Unmasked! (Photo credit: JD Hancock)

Imagine you visit a company’s website, do not log in, fill out any forms, volunteer your email address or otherwise identify yourself. After you leave the page, someone calls you to offer the company’s goods or services. Creepy, or clever marketing?

Generating such customer leads is the business of Relead, a Santa Monica, Calif. site.  “Convert anonymous web visitors into sales leads,” the company advertises on its website Relead.com. “We can track exactly WHO is visiting your website, and how valuable or interested they are in your business.”

The web page shows a cartoon animation of featureless heads going down a conveyer belt below the caption: “Your unknown visitors.” Then it shows a steady stream of fully identifiable faces coming down the conveyer belt with money over their heads flying into your website. The punch line comes below: “We identify your visitors.”

The service started in November, aimed at U.S. and British companies trying to reach out to other business clients. They charge $5 per lead, and provide emails and phone numbers. James Welsh, Relead’s chief marketing officer, said more than 1,000 companies use the service.

“There are several ways customers are using Relead. Some of them 'warm call' prospects and others use targeted email campaigns,” he said. “Relead also allows sales/marketing folk to understand precisely what their prospects are interested in - i.e. the exact product pages they have been visiting.”

Relead combines a number of different methods to identify visitors to a client’s website. “We leverage several data sources to enable this solution: IP address data, GEO location data, B2B data-vendor data, social network feeds, several data-check engines and more,” Welsh said.

When I asked if he could supply the name of a company that uses Relead, he cited DeskTime.com, which is part of the same company that hatched Relead, Latvia’s Draugiem Group.

Wide adoption of technologies such as Relead could, for example, allow drug companies to know who specifically was looking at information on various ailments on their pages, diet companies to identify potentially obese people, or allow adult sites to market to anonymous visitors – if these companies were willing to pay for the marketing leads. Of course, it makes sense for companies to seek out potential clients, but some users object to the covert nature of such data gathering.

"While Relead makes innovative use of technology, they do so at the expense of unsuspecting users. The customer has no idea that this information-sharing network even exists,” said Michael Bar-Sinai, a software engineer and a visiting scholar at Harvard’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science. “Relead blatantly betrays the trust of consumers. Quite simply, they sacrifice customers' privacy for the sake of marketing.”

“This practice should not be legal.  But the technology is a few steps ahead of the law. Customers should consider taking their business to sites that are not part of Relead's network."

Although Welsh, whose LinkedIn page describes himself as a London “B2B/ B2C Collaborator, Innovator, Online Marketing and Sales Hustler,” did answer basic questions about the company by email, he declined to talk by telephone over a period of months. He did not keep several scheduled telephone appointments. A total of two dozen emails dating back to February could not get him on the phone.

I also tried to reach Robert Zvingulis, who describes himself as Relead’s “co-founder & chief Hustler.” He sent an email on Thursday to say he had suffered from a serious auto accident three weeks ago and would not be able to speak before mid-July at the soonest.

After I informed Welsh and other company officials on Wednesday by email that an article about their company would appear in Forbes on Friday, the site went offline. An archived version of Relead.com as it appeared before then is here.

Was Relead redoing the site or undergoing technical difficulties? Was it shut down? Lauris Liberts, the founder of the Draugiem Group, which calls itself Latvia’s largest IT company, had listed Relead as one of its projects as recently as last month. On Thursday night he said his company was no longer associated with the site. He declined to say why and suggested I contact Welsh.

Welsh also works as the partnership manager at London-based Huddlebuy, a deals site for small businesses. The company’s CEO, Saurav Chopra, said on Thursday that Welsh had just gotten married and was likely on his honeymoon.