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. 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 gen ...
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
David E. Goldberg, 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 Uni ...
, 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 tech ...
'' 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.
See also
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List of social bookmarking websites
A social bookmarking website is a centralized online service that allows users to store and share Internet bookmarks. Such a website typically offers a blend of social and organizational tools, such as annotation, categorization, folksonomy-bas ...
*
AddThis
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AddToAny
References
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* {{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