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Thursday, May 20, 2010

Privacy? What privacy?

I'm not a web expert, nor am I the paranoid type... but should QuitFacebook.com, who has privacy concerns against Facebook, be tracking its visitors with cookies?

I found these in Firefox's cookies.

QuitFaceBookDayCookies

In case you're wondering what they do:

  • __utmz tracks where a visitor came from (search engine, search keyword, link)
  • __utma tracks each user's amount of visits, first, last visit.
  • __utmb and __utmc are used to track when a visit starts and ends to some decent time resolution (c expires quickly). If you look at cookie state changes (e.g. using firecookie), you will see these change regularly.
  • __utmv is used for user-custom variables in Analytics

http://helpful.knobs-dials.com/index.php/Utma,_utmb,_utmz_cookies

Why would they care where you come from? Or how often you visit their site? Hmmm...?

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