Apparently Sitemeter, one of the services I use to track stats about visitors and activity here, recently started inserting cookies for an advertising company. These cookies are essentially spyware, used to track visitors across the internet by matching up that cookie on each site that is visited.
I've disabled Sitemeter, and won't be going back. I've been very happy with them for the last few years, but sneaking spyware onto visitors is not cool. StatCounter has pledged to not do that, so I'll be using them, alongside Google Analytics. (it could be argued that Google could be tracking visitors in a similar pattern of spyware cookies - not sure how I feel about that, but at least they're relatively up front about it, being an online ad company. Sitemeter just silently changed the rules...)
If you want to clean up your browser after Sitemeter, delete any cookies you might have from "specificclick.com" (I had 4 cookies from that domain, but I'm not sure if they were a result of Sitemeter tracking code from my blog, or from elsewhere...)
References to the spyware cookie include:
- Bucco
- Eric Odom
- StatCounter (which is a competitor of Sitemeter, so take with a grain of salt)
I'm sorry for any inconvenience. Hopefully that's the end of it...