My post on Sitemeter’s use of spyware in their tracking code has gained a LOT of attention over the past few days. On average, the post brings about 400 visits a day via search engines and such. It’s clear a lot of peeps are out there seeking questions.

While Sitemeter may not have answers, they at least have a response.

Hello,

Thanks for your email.

The cookie you are seeing is from a trusted partner who we are working with to provide more intelligence to you about your visitors. In the past few days we’ve begun beta testing this cookie.

Over the next few months we will be rolling out enhancements to our service that will offer you more information about your users like their other content interests and demographics (a la Quantcast). In addition this cookie will allow us to offer other new useful features in the future, including tracking Unique Visitors, Heat Mapping etc.

We believe that this new information along with our current services we already provide will be of great benefit to our users. Keep watching our page for announcements regarding these upgrades and changes. We would also ask that you use discretion in sharing this information. We are trying not to show our hand to our competitors.

If you would rather not participate in this process we can offer you a couple options -

1 - If you replace your current Java code with the standard HTML Sitemeter code the cookie will no longer be issued.
2 - We can move you to a new server that will be restricted from the cookie process.

If you would like to move to the restricted server please let us know and we will create a new FREE upgraded account for you. We won’t be able to transfer any historical data, but you will still be able to log into your old account and view your old account stats.

Thanks,

The Sitemeter Team

“The cookie you are seeing is from a trusted partner who we are working with to provide more intelligence to you about your visitors.”

Not only is this an admission, it’s also a defense of the spyware cookie.

Shame on you, Sitemeter. You should know better than this.

-Eric Odom

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