[bcappel]

Evildave, on 08 December 2011 - 09:52 AM, said:

And here's a FOURTH piece of constant spying and prying:

Right-click on any link in a forum post, 'copy' link, and paste it into any editor. You'll get a nice, long, spammy thing, kind of like this...

http://api.viglink.com/api/click?format=go&key=2b0adaafa9ad8a29fede7758fada1730&loc=http%3A%2F%2Fforums.pcworld.com%2Findex.php%3F%2Ftopic%2F131757-us-navy-declares-war-on-trash%2Fpage__gopid__559074%23entry559074&v=1&libid=1323366245993&out=http%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FWaste-to-energy&ref=http%3A%2F%2Fforums.pcworld.com%2Findex.php%3Fapp%3Dforums%26module%3Dpost%26section%3Dpost%26do%3Dreply_post%26f%3D2023%26t%3D131757%26qpid%3D559031&title=Us%20Navy%20Declares%20War%20On%20Trash%20-%20PCWorld%20Forums&txt=http%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia....Waste-to-energy&jsonp=vglnk_jsonp_13233662516661

http://www.viglink.com/

Every link that gets posted into a forum post gets wrapped in this 'viglink.com' stuff, identifying what you were reading, and of course yielding up your IP address and any previously saved cookies along with the HTTP request. It hits their site first, and then redirects to the referenced page, enabling even more spying, on the off chance it's a product link that PCWorld could get paid for, but always recording and watching what you do, regardless.

Accumulate and resell those statistics.

Or potentially report to online reputation management when people post certain kinds of links, because you need to get those shills in, earning their money, too. An invaluable service.

I'm sorry, but you are not even remotely close. viglink has nothing to do with tracking anything. Stop making stuff up and posting it as fact. As a reminder, intentionally posting false or disparaging information is a violation of the PCWorld Community Standards and will result in being banned.

Bill

[LiveBrianD]

Odd - I allowed the viglink script and still didn't get that when I tried copying links from the forum.

[Evildave]

Just looks kind of suspicious, is all.

If not for 'tracking', then what?

Why be quietly redirecting through links and pinging MULTIPLE different web sites from javascript?

Visit the web site. "Get Paid for Clicks from Your Content"
http://www.viglink.com/

Do you fancy that they give money away for free, with absolutely no benefit to themselves?

Think about how charitable they must be! Never getting any money from anyone else, for giving money to people for redirecting through their site to open links!

I can't imagine this 'viglink' site would pay anyone a single penny if they weren't actively keeping track of anything. If only for their own tax records to tell the IRS about all of this 'charitable giving'.

[Evildave]

Apparently, only Chrome is doing it for me. Firefox & Safari didn't, but there are layers of filtering that are installed on all of these, and I'm too lazy to dig much into them.

Wget didn't have any scripting content, but the useragent string would have identified it as something that doesn't handle scripting.

A casual survey of a few other sites revealed that it's not CHROME or any of the (very few) plugins doing it, because their links were clean.

I turned off 'javascript', and the long, long links stopped. Of course, then the site menus behave a bit wonky.

So I poked around and installed 'Ghostery' from the Chrome app store, and now it's behaving much better, and identifying a list of nasty little surprises, and it even tells you about them, and optionally blocks them. It looks cute there between the WOT icon and the wrench. I'll let you guess about what 'option' I chose for blocking.

On this page, it identifies...

'Crowd Science'
http://www.ghostery....s/crowd_science

'DoubleClick'
http://www.ghostery....pps/doubleclick

'Gigya Beacon'
http://www.ghostery....ps/gigya_beacon

'Google Analytics'
http://www.ghostery....oogle_analytics

'Omniture'
http://www.ghostery.com/apps/omniture

'Parse.ly'
http://www.ghostery.com/apps/parse.ly

It's not a matter of 'opinion'.

One bit of 'tracking' is fairly common, and it's believable that someone would be too lazy to write their own bit of scripting to keep track, and use an outside party to do it.

But SIX? This is just blatant.

Omniture, I know for a FACT could do both the link tracking and page impressions on its own, so why have SO MANY MORE?

PCWorld is literally BROADCASTING what you look at, what you click on, what you READ, what you POST, and by extension, that makes your IP address identifiable to at least six different external agencies with at least six different data sets about what you're up to. And if you followed a link and bought something from a web site that someone recommended here, they'd be able to find out who you are. Trivial bit of database indexing and mining, and they have a name, probably a face, since we have these 'social network' elements, too. And the databases can remember that, and associate your account name HERE, from then on, even if you only bought something once.

What PCWorld gets from these links (money, maybe some statistics to wave at advertisers) doesn't mean that the external parties don't derive MORE benefit. In fact, to be profitable, they MUST.

This post has been edited by Evildave: 09 December 2011 - 04:51 PM

[LiveBrianD]

Yeah, I found 13 of them on tomshardware.com. Since I don't want all these people knowing every detail of what I do, I block the scripts.

[bcappel]

I'm sorry, but you are completely wrong and have no idea what you are talking about.

To reiterate, the information we collect is used for internal purposes only. It is not shared with third parties. The companies that we pay to collect the information DO NOT share the information with anyone. The information that is collected does not, in any way, link activities of a single user. There is no capability for anyone to look at the data we collect and trace it to any given member, period. To state anything other than that shows a complete lack of knowledge of the technology in use.

Since you continue to insist to hijack this thread with your baseless conspiracy theories, this thread is now closed.

Bill