Is inq.com Safe?

As mentioned, inq.com is owned by TouchCommerce (http://www.touchcommerce.com). The home page there is such a hive of marketing-speak, it takes some digging to figure out exactly what they do. The TL;DR version is they try to help their customers figure out how to sell more products via their web site to both new and existing customers. As such, they track visitors within the site, but it sounds like they have no interest in tracking you as an individual or anonymously across web sites. First, I found it interesting that SunDevil311 in his review said that he/she encountered it on T-Mobile, while I first found it on Verizon Wireless. ***** . TouchCommerce's site lists some of their major clients as AT&T, Comcast, DirectTV. It's a whos-who of Verizon's major competitors in the wireless and other markets. ***** (TouchCommerce.com) is a customer conversion/retention service. They try to help their customer (e.g., Verizon Wireless) convert viewers into customers and help keep existing customers. They analyze a site and make recommendations to increase conversion/retention (e.g., change page flow to go from 6 clicks to purchase something to just 2 clicks), train and staff agents to directly interact with customers, offer some type of chat tool, and have analytical tools to sift through site traffic to track visitor behavior. From their LinkedIn page at ***** , "TouchCommerce is the innovator in custom online engagement solutions that optimize conversion results for market-leading brands. Founded with a retail-driven perspective to replicate the in-store customer experience online, we combine leading-edge technology and deeply experienced talent to identify and convert high-value site visitors by providing the live assistance they need to complete their purchase. We design and deploy fully-integrated, customized solutions catering to individual client specifications. Leveraging our proprietary technology platform RightTouch, a targeting engine that deepens understanding of your visitor, our experts help you plan, engage and achieve results optimization. This unique combination enables real-time analytics for instant actionable insights. Whether for customer acquisition or customer care and retention, implemented together or separately, your TouchCommerce solution is built to increase sales, increase self-service and reduce support costs while ultimately ensuring a more satisfactory online shopping experience." Still a ton of marketing-speak there, but then they are selling their products to marketers at other companies, so it probably reads well to them. I read it more like (my paraphrasing here): TouchCommerce provides personnel and tools to make visitors to our customer's site have an experience closer to that of being in an actual store. We train and provide live agents to answer customer's questions and help them make purchases. We analyze our customer's web site and recommend ways to make the site easier to navigate for the purpose of selling products. For our customers, we have tools to show what their visitors do while at the web site such as what pages they visit, how long they stay on a page and where they go next and we customize those tools to fit our customer's site. This helps our customers understand what their customers are most interested in at a specific time and how that changes over time. Our whole reason for existence is to help our customers increase sales via their web site.

I encountered a script from inq.com on t-mobile.com. inq.com links to hxxp://www.touchcommerce.com, the home page of TouchCommerce, Inc. A quick glance at their Privacy Policy makes it pretty clear that they are a seemingly reputable web analytics company. Under "Web Server Logs," Section 3a of the TouchCommerce Privacy Policy, they state the following: "When you visit our website, we may track information to administer the site and analyze its usage. Examples of information we may track include: Your Internet protocol address. The kind of browser or computer you use. Number of links you click within the site. State or country from which you accessed the site. Date and time of your visit. Name of your Internet service provider. Web page you linked to our site from. Pages you viewed on the site. We also use third-party services, such as Google Analytics, to collect and analyze such information." Draw your own ethical conclusions; personally, I just blocked it with NoScript. It seems to be for some kind of customer service chat possibly, not something that I'll be using or needing anyway. That being said, I wouldn't give this site a full "I Trust It" rating, since they *are* ultimately tracking you and collecting potentially personally identifiable information.

i started my rating at the 'good' only because of the rating given when Google visited this site? Of the 1 pages we tested on the site over the past 90 days, 0 page(s) resulted in malicious software being downloaded and installed without user consent. The last time Google visited this site was on 2011-07-13, and suspicious content was never found on this site within the past 90 days. This site was hosted on 1 network(s) including AS10912 (INTERNAP). Has this site acted as an intermediary resulting in further distribution of malware? Over the past 90 days, inq.com did not appear to function as an intermediary for the infection of any sites. Has this site hosted malware? No, this site has not hosted malicious software over the past 90 days.