2007-04-20

Let down by a friend...

The first two things I do after returning form a busy days work are, check my email, then check site statistics of visitors to this blog. After doing these two today, I loaded up my blog in another tab just to check whether all is well after the changes I've made to layout during past few weeks.
Nothing was special, or is it? There is a message at the end of the web page from Firefox's NoScript Add-on. That was odd. I have enabled all the scripts from my blog. Still there is another new java script that has not been enabled, originating from my own blog!! See the screen capture below.
As it was not there yesterday when I loaded the blog, I just thought of doing a Google search to get to know more about it.
I was shocked to read the search results. I was shocked more than on that day that I had my blogger account switched (see Blogger busted... & Blogger busted - part II).
My trusted site statistics tracking service, sitemeter had deceived me. Please read this article SiteMeter Installing SpyWare In Your Website?. It seems they have sold the trust we kept on them to a third party. I am ashamed to be associated with them.
As bloggers, most of us rely on site statistics tracking services to keep track of the visitors to our blogs (and of course to other web pages). We check on statistics regularly to see just how many read our sites, what search quarries bring traffic to our sites etc..
But it seems sitemeter had been tracking all our blog readers' web browsing habits with the help from specificclick.net. Thats a bit unethical to say the least.
So please read Things you should know before using Sitemeter. At the end of it you can see how you can remove tracking cookies that have been installed from Sitemeter's partner specificclick.net. If you have visited this blog earlier or have visited another site that used their service, please try block their cookies, as they may have already placed their cookies in your browser.
Dear friends of the blogsphere, if you are using sitemeter, then you are exposing your site visitors to being spied upon. Take care of your valued site visitors!!! I have already...

4 comments:

  1. Probably would be described as anti social by those who want to keep a track of visitors (like unique visitors, returning visitors...) but if using firefox, we can set it up so that firefox deletes all cookies when shutting down.,,

    tools>options>privacy>cookies>keep untill

    But i guess a bulk of visitors use IE... so good of ye to get rid of snoopy spy!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks for letting me know Pran. I shall get rid of site meter. This really is terrible to think that they've broken our trust

    ReplyDelete
  3. yeah disturbing news :-(

    Use google analytics I think thats the best.. But its not sooo userfriendly to me like Site meter..

    ReplyDelete
  4. well, I knew there is something like that but I'm using http://www.stat24.com/en/

    and well, I found in my archive a lot of comments from anonymous person and most of them had the same text... so it had to be a spamer or someone was trying to hack into my blog...

    well... spams, viruses... everything is just like all the illnesses

    we just got to live with them and try to deal with them...

    take care!

    ReplyDelete

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