ShareThis is a technology company headquartered in Palo Alto, CA, with offices in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. It offers free website tools and plugins for online content creators. ShareThis collects data on user behavior, and provides this to advertisers and technology companies for ad targeting, analytics, and customer acquisition purposes. ShareThis has an exclusive license with the University of Illinois for patent applications made by co-founder

David E. Goldberg David Edward Goldberg (born September 26, 1953) is an American computer scientist, civil engineer, and former professor. Until 2010, he was a professor in the department of Industrial and Enterprise Systems Engineering (IESE) at the Universi ...

. The patents include

genetic algorithm In computer science and operations research, a genetic algorithm (GA) is a metaheuristic inspired by the process of natural selection that belongs to the larger class of evolutionary algorithms (EA). Genetic algorithms are commonly used to gene ...

s and

machine learning Machine learning (ML) is a field of inquiry devoted to understanding and building methods that 'learn', that is, methods that leverage data to improve performance on some set of tasks. It is seen as a part of artificial intelligence. Machine ...

technologies used for the purposes of information collection and discovery based on a user's sharing behavior.

History

ShareThis was founded in 2007 by

, an engineering professor at

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (U of I, Illinois, University of Illinois, or UIUC) is a public land-grant research university in Illinois in the twin cities of Champaign and Urbana. It is the flagship institution of the Univ ...

, and Tim Schigel. In July 2011, Kurt Abrahamson joined the company as CEO and served for 7 years before transitioning into an Executive Chairman role. In June 2018, Dana Hayes Jr. was named CEO of the company. In February 2019, ''

The Register ''The Register'' is a British technology news website co-founded in 1994 by Mike Magee, John Lettice and Ross Alderson. The online newspaper's masthead sublogo is "''Biting the hand that feeds IT''." Their primary focus is information tec ...

'' published a story indicating that 16 companies, including ShareThis, were the victims of a security incident. A security breach exposed 41 million account records containing name, username, email address, DES-hashed password, gender, date of birth, and other profile info. The data was listed for sale on the dark web, and following publishing of ''The Register'''s article, ShareThis verified the breach and sent notifications to compromised users. ShareThis then launched an investigation with forensic and data security experts to review the incident and identify measures to improve security.

References

* * * * * {{cite web , accessdate=2010-04-08 , url=http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-9892624-7.html , title=Publisher widget ShareThis raises $15 million , publisher=CNET , date=2008-03-13 , author=Olsen, Stefanie

External links

ShareThis.com website
Social bookmarking websites Social software

History

See also

References

External links