Goodbye Site Meter

Just goes to show, you can't be too careful. A while ago, wanting to know a little more about the traffic this blog sees, I added a widget from Site Meter to the layout.

Today I discovered that Site Meter have done a deal with a third party company, and that the code they send out includes references to specificclick.net pages, allowing tracking via cookies. So I have removed the widget and am looking for a new site metering technology.

It's not a huge security problem, but it means that you can be tracked across multiple sites that each use SiteMeter's logging widgets. This is allowed by their terms and conditions:

Site Meter may from time to time also authorize and facilitate the use of cookies from trusted third party business partners to gather and aggregate additional, anonymous, and non-Personal Information data from general internet visitors for the purpose of providing our customers with additional information about their viewing audience.

It's true that as long as SiteMeter don't release users' personal information there's nothing that specificclick.net can do over and above correlation of visits by anonymous users across multiple sites. But if one of those sites collects personal data and chooses to release it, that privacy is over. I decided I'd rather not subject my readers to that risk. If you have any such cookies in your browser I'd recommend you delete them. If you don't know how to do that you can find instructions at this About Cookies page.