ghostery.com shows you tracking systems on your site
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.
