LOKKER Web Privacy Risk Score helps organizations measure and mitigate online privacy threats

LOKKER has released its LOKKER Web Privacy Risk Score, the assessment tool that provides businesses with a clear, numeric rating of their privacy risk across a global portfolio of websites, individual websites within that portfolio, and the individual web pages of each website.

LOKKER’s Web Privacy Risk Score is a measure that quantifies a company’s potential risk of privacy violations pertaining to the collection and sharing of customers’ online information.

Organizations in all industries are under increased scrutiny for the use of third-party trackers that collect customers’ information, particularly social media trackers like the Facebook (Meta) pixel.

Companies are often unaware of how many trackers, cookies, and other applications operate behind the scenes of their websites, and the potential privacy liabilities they create.

A wave of class-action lawsuits in many states, along with federal regulatory enforcement actions, show that consumer data privacy is escalating in importance, necessitating that businesses maintain control of it – or deal with the ramifications of not doing so.

Consumers have also confirmed their interest in maintaining their online privacy despite not necessarily knowing how best to do so.

LOKKER’s Web Privacy Risk Score is based on a proprietary calculation of seven privacy risks commonly found on websites across industries and geographies. LOKKER’s analysis of over 170,000 websites has informed the basis of the privacy risk score.

The seven privacy risks that LOKKER analyzes include:

• Presence of known malware (e.g., data skimmers)
• Javascript that collects and transmits form data to third parties
• Presence of session replay tools
• Third-party tracking scripts (e.g., ad tracking, cross-site tracking)
• First- and third-party cookies
• Consent management/cookie banner
• Third-party requests from foreign domains

Each web page is scored individually, and the average is used to determine the overall site score. The rating is based on a 0 to 1,000 point range. The higher the score, the higher a site’s privacy risk. The score has adjusted weighting for the various risk types based on the third-party scripts’ function, frequency, and location.

“The recent surge of class-action lawsuits and enforcement actions have organizations in every industry scrambling to get their website tracking under control,” said Ian Cohen, CEO of LOKKER.

“The issue is that many trackers are difficult for organizations to see or manage, and asking users to opt-in or out of hundreds of trackers is unreasonable. The LOKKER score makes it easy to identify privacy threats and take immediate action. Companies need tools like this to adhere to new privacy laws and keep their customers safe,” Cohen continued.

LOKKER’s Web Privacy Risk Score gives IT, legal, and marketing teams a clear view of their organizations’ website risks across all their web properties.

Companies that manage dozens or hundreds of websites can now have an easy summary view of the risk score across their portfolio, identify high-risk sites, and quickly drill down to review specific high-risk pages.

With greater visibility to risks, companies can then use LOKKER’s Privacy Edge tool to automate blocking of these unauthorized third-party scripts.