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The i2Coalition Launches an Initiative to Make Public Data Aggregation More Ethical

The Ethical Web Data Collection Initiative’s five founding members include Oxylabs and Zyte.

Adam Dubois
The i2Coalition, an organization that represents internet infrastructure providers, has announced the launch of a new initiative. Called the Ethical Web Data Collection Initiative (EWDCI), it aims to advocate for beneficial technical standards and ethical business practices in the public data aggregation industry. In other words, it will try to further legitimize the field of data collection. The EWDCI includes five founding members: Coresignal, Oxylabs, Smartproxy, Sprious, and Zyte. The initiative will actively seek to recruit more members of the field to jointly shape the industry’s direction. EDIT: In April 2024, NetNut joined the coalition as one of the founding members. To quote Christian Dawson, the i2Coalition’s Executive Director:

The EWDCI aims to reach companies with this message of ethical data aggregation, as well as to educate consumers at large and legislators worldwide in the interest of informed, empowered action.

This will promote industry-led stewardship of important – and already widely adopted – technology in the interest of solving any present challenges and setting the industry up for forthcoming success.

The i2Coalition calls itself the leading voice for web hosting companies, data centers, domain registrars and registries, cloud infrastructure providers, managed service providers, and related tech. It was responsible for creating the VPN Trust initiative, which promotes best practices in the VPN space. 

This announcement once again proves that the industry is leaving its Wild West phase. While there will always be shady businesses and questionable use cases, the recent closures of RSocks and 911 S5 show that responsibility and ethics have become a necessity for anyone that wants to compete on a large scale.

If you’re interested to join the EWDCI, you can shoot i2Coalition an email.

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Adam Dubois
Proxy geek and developer.
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