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SiteMeter Responds
Posted April 10, 2007 – 10:55 pm by Yakov Shafranovich in TechnologyAs seen in the comments of my previous posts and here, Sitemeter decided to respond. Two points:
1. Why wait for over a week before a response? Blogs are there for a reason – its gives companies ability to respond quickly.
2. Why not post about it on their own blog?
Setting that aside the crux of Sitemeter’s argument has been that Specific Click’s cookies aren’t spyware and if anti-spyware companies label it as such, it is their problem. Additionally, Specific Click provides an opt out option and so does Sitemeter itself. They also were nice enough to update their privacy policy (but not before I filed a complaint with the FTC).
However, they tend to miss the point – the issue is not what they did but rather how they did it. Any company has a basic responsibility towards their customers about informing them of major changes before doing them. In Sitemeter’s case if they would have blogged about it ahead of time AND let people have an option of opting out, it would have been very different. Instead, they did it without asking AND did not do anything about it for over a week after the story broke. All of which makes me very suspicious. For now, I am still holding out for a little bit to see if anything changes before making my decision to use their services.
Tags: privacy, security, sitemeter —
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One Response to “SiteMeter Responds”
Good Analysis. I’ve been watching this ordeal unfold in the blogs for the last 2 weeks and I have to say that most of the people writing in the blogs have no clue what they are talking about. I use both sitemeter and statcounter and I tend to know a few things about cookies and spyware. Cookies are not spyware and the specificclick cookie is just like any other cookie out there. I was more concerned with WHY they were doing this? I emailed them directly and they gave me an email response similar to what others have posted, basically detailing that they are working providing new reports about the demographics and content interest of the people who come to my site. To me, that could add a lot of value since I blog about a myriad of topics but I also think that it could help my Google earnings on ad sense since I recently have been passing them keywords of certain blogs and my cpm’s have been increasing.
As an avid unprofessional blogger, I understand that I have a duty to my readers to inform them about issues that I am educated on and am somewhat of an unofficial expert…basically, I’ve done my research and I am not misleading them. The problem with sitemeter debaucle is that this originally got posted by their competitor, statcounter. I received this panic email from statcounter to their customers which just stunk of self promotion. AND, I found it interesting that when when I check my stats on statcounter, guess what? I receive advertisements from from statcounter that contain specificclick.net cookies! So, it’s seems that specificclick must purchase ads from statcounter but if they were such harmful spyware, then why would statcounter work with them? But in the end, we all took the bait hook, line and sinker. It just shocked me that places like Digg and other recognized blogs ‘pulled the fire alarm’ just to see people run. If we (bloggers) are going to continue to have the influence that we currently do have, then we are going to need to do a better job on fully informing our readers and be less concerned with jumping on the controversy bandwagon just to get our rank up in google.
By Jay B on Apr 11, 2007