Adtools » Adblocking http://blog.adtools.co.uk Advertising Operations & Technology Fri, 25 Nov 2011 13:21:30 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 ghostery.com shows you tracking systems on your site http://blog.adtools.co.uk/ghostery-com-shows-you-tracking-systems-on-your-site/575/ http://blog.adtools.co.uk/ghostery-com-shows-you-tracking-systems-on-your-site/575/#comments Tue, 10 Aug 2010 11:28:57 +0000 Sean http://blog.adtools.co.uk/?p=575 Ghostery is a new free service/browser-plugin for IE, Firefox & Chrome which highlights many tracking, behavioural & analytics tags (commonly referred to as web-bugs or pixels) on a site’s page. More importantly from our industry’s perspective is that it can also act as filtering mechanism and gives the user direct access to block any/all of the (at time of writing) 266 bugs it understands. The updated list of bugs is probably the first time I’ve seen a comprehensive list of such information and well worth a look if only to give you an idea of just how many different tracking systems are being employed across the internet.

The tool doesn’t expose data about what cookies were sent or how long each call took (which may be of more use to the more etch focused AdOps staff trying ensure data isn’t being exposed that they don’t want to, but it does provide a clean and simple view of which tagging systems are present in a page.

I’m not going to cover the implications of wide-scale blocking of such tags by users, there’s plenty of opinion, debate and research on these matters suffice to say that protecting your user’s privacy should be at the forefront of your every business decision you make in this area.  Failure to protect your users will only result in a user-base that drifts away to competitor sites where their privacy concerns are met.

It’s worth preparing some responses to individuals in your organisation to deal with questions from your non-techy savvy staff and senior management who may not be fully aware of the variety and sale of tagging systems.

http://www.ghostery.com/

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]]> http://blog.adtools.co.uk/ghostery-com-shows-you-tracking-systems-on-your-site/575/feed/ 0 How not to deal with Adblock users http://blog.adtools.co.uk/how-not-to-deal-with-adblock-users/507/ http://blog.adtools.co.uk/how-not-to-deal-with-adblock-users/507/#comments Thu, 22 Apr 2010 08:16:34 +0000 Sean http://blog.adtools.co.uk/?p=507 Techdirt reports that gaming site The Escapist has apparently banned users who mention the Firefox add-on Adblock. After much user anger they listened to their users and later un-banned those them but it seems to have left a bitter taste in the users mouths.

http://techdirt.com/articles/20100420/1042189110.shtml

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