What if you could observe how specific audiences and users interact with your sites and site content? What about seeing where else they like to hang out online — social networks and social games, for instance — or what sorts of actions they take after seeing advertisements?

Latitude has partnered with Wakoopa to offer LifeTracker, a web behavior technology that we believe strikes the right balance between powerful analytics and respect for participant privacy.

On the data side, LifeTracker functions like any of the best-in-class web analytics services, with a few important differences:

1. It provides a view of people’s behaviors across the Web, and not simply on properties that you own (great for scoping the competition, among other uses)
2. It uses real demographic data (and psychographic data, and any other custom profiling point you’d like to use), as opposed to the funny-math approximations that you get through typical analytics services. If you’ve ever wondered, for instance, how different customer segments react to your campaigns, we can upload segments into the tracker and compare behaviors.
3. It allows us to ask questions to tracked panelists in an unobtrusive way (via notifications in the menu bar)

In terms of participant privacy, we find Wakoopa’s technology to be far superior to other options we’ve explored. For example:

1. The application is fully opt-in. Unlike cookies, participants actively consent to being tracked.
2. Participants can black-list any site from being reported. For example, if they don’t want us to know which site they use for online banking, it’s fully in their control to keep us from knowing.
3. We can’t collect any information beyond URLs and ad exposure tags. This means no names, addresses, passwords or other sensitive info.
4. Participants can pause and/or delete the tracker application whenever they’d like — and if they pause the tracker and reboot their computers, it’ll remain paused until they decide otherwise
5. Participants can view their own data, in comparison to the whole panel, and explore their own Web usage in a variety of ways.