Sitemeter Goes Spyware

Posted on May 14, 2007
Filed Under Blogs |

Things you should know before using Sitemeter « Michael Sync: It’s so sad for me to hear that SiteMeter, a well-known web stats providers, is pushing specificclick tracking and advertising cookies on to visitors of sites using their service. (You may already heard about this since it was happened last month.) For me, that news is pretty new. Actually, I came to know about this when I read this post in Wordpress Support Forum.

I stopped using Sitemeter a while back because I couldn’t figure out where I could update my credit card information. In light of the information about Sitemeter teaming up with a known spyware service, well I’m actually glad I dropped it. This should be a lesson for anyone contemplating juicing your revenue stream through less than legitimate measures, you become toxic in the process. Remember Gator?

Framing the discussion about spyware would take more space than this post can provide, but in my view there are two critical dimensions, the first is whether or not the user is opting in and secondly where the data that is being created is going and for what purpose.

MyBlogLog drops cookies and tracks user behavior, but I’m implicitly opting in by the act of creating a MyBlogLog profile. I guess you could argue that data is being generated even without a visitor having a profile, but in the absence of compelling evidence that Yahoo! is doing something nefarious with this data I’m inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt. Also, MyBlogLog is collecting information for the purpose of providing me additional benefits in the form of community.

I suspect we are going to see more situations like this develop as companies struggle with the absolute requirement to generate revenue in the absence of customers actually willing to pay them. Actually in Sitemeter’s case as it relates to my experience, just figuring out WHERE to pay them was an impediment.

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