spazeboy

Why I Switched to StatCounter

SiteMeter seems to be the most widely used stat tracker in the blogosphere. MLN uses it. CT Local Politics uses it. ConnecticutBLOG, Drinking Liberally in New Milford, and CT Bob use it. Until recently, even I used it.

So why have I switched to StatCounter? Geek News Central explains:

Examination on my own has discovered, and I am able to confirm, on two of my sites, that Sitemeter was sending “specificclick cookies” to anyone visiting this site. Violating not only my policy but apparently not following their own terms of service.

I have removed the SiteMeter.com counter and now have all of my sites using Google Analytics only. I am going to contact my attorney as well on this mater to find out what recourse we have in this mater.

This is not the behavior one would expect from a company that you pay a annual fee to, for service. This is so over the top that I can hardly believe that the would betray the trust of their subscribers to such a high level.

I’m not a paying customer, thankfully. All I can do is use my blog to raise awareness that if you use SiteMeter on your website, you’re allowing them to install third party tracking cookies. If you visit sites that have SiteMeter installed, your clicks and browsing on those sites are being tracked by a third party.

And I can switch. I switched to StatCounter. I just took the latest numbers of unique visits and page views from SiteMeter and put them in as the “starting” numbers for StatCounter. The number you see in the footer of this website is the total number of visits since June 2006. My StatCounter stats can be viewed here.

Ed Bott has tips on how to block third-party cookies like the ones surreptitiously installed by SiteMeter. Alternatively, you could install the CookieSafe extension for Firefox. And if you don’t use Firefox for browsing, now is as good a time as any to give it a whirl.