Nielsen is an audience-measurement and market-research company ("Watch" TV/streaming ratings and "Buy" retail-performance segments); it was taken private in October 2022 by a consortium led by Evergreen Coast Capital (an Elliott Investment Management affiliate) and Brookfield Business Partners in a roughly $16 billion all-cash deal, ending its NYSE listing. Nielsen's own privacy statement describes collecting survey/panel participant data plus website usage data via cookies and similar technologies (IP address, device/browser identifiers, viewing/purchase behavior), states it will never use personal data to advertise or sell third-party goods directly to respondents, but discloses sharing data with clients, service providers, other market-research firms, and third parties in a corporate transaction; it also runs a separate online-advertising/audience-measurement cookie and pixel-tag program that assigns a unique cookie identifier to track ad exposure across sites. No privacy-regulator action or data breach was found in this research; Nielsen did have its national and local TV ratings accreditation suspended by the Media Rating Council in 2021 over pandemic-era undercounting (an industry data-integrity dispute, not a privacy violation), with national accreditation later reinstated.
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Nielsen's privacy statement states that when visiting its website, Nielsen or third parties collect usage log data and device/network data including IP address, browser operating system and version, and device identifiers via cookies and similar technologies, and separately states Nielsen may obtain additional data about respondents from other sources related to demographic characteristics, viewing/purchasing behavior, and exposure to content or advertising.
Nielsen's own newsroom page announces the completion, on October 11, 2022, of its sale to a private-equity consortium composed of Evergreen Coast Capital Corp. (an affiliate of Elliott Investment Management L.P.) and Brookfield Business Partners L.P. together with institutional partners, in an all-cash transaction valued at approximately $16 billion including assumed debt, ending Nielsen's NYSE listing.
Nielsen's privacy statement states it will never use personal data to advertise, promote, market or sell third-party goods or services directly to respondents or their household members, while separately disclosing that data is shared with clients, third-party service providers (hosting, data analysis, backups, security), other market-research companies, institutions conducting historical/academic/longitudinal studies, and relevant third parties in the event of a corporate transaction such as a merger or sale.
Variety reported that the Media Rating Council, the industry body that accredits audience-measurement services, suspended its accreditation of Nielsen's national TV ratings service in September 2021 and declined Nielsen's request for a pause in scrutiny of its local ratings, after determining Nielsen likely undercounted TV audiences earlier that year; Nielsen stated in response that the suspension would not affect the usability of its data and that it would work with the MRC to resolve it.
Nielsen's privacy statement describes a dedicated online-advertising/audience-measurement program: upon consent, Nielsen places a proprietary cookie on the user's device containing a unique cookie identifier, and when the user later views an online ad containing a Nielsen pixel tag, Nielsen reads that identifier to record ad exposure and collect additional device, browser, IP-address and location data — cross-site ad-exposure tracking infrastructure distinct from first-party site analytics.