Google Eyeballs Planted On 92% Of Top Websites

[Peaches]

Google eyeballs planted on 92% of top websites

'The most dominant player in the tracking market'

By Cade Metz in San Francisco

"A new privacy study says that Google-controlled web bugs are tracking users on 92 of the net's top 100 sites and about 88 per cent of almost 400,000 other domains.

Using a Firefox browser plug-in called Ghostery, three graduate students in the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley recently examined the use of cookies, beacons, and other trackers on 393,829 distinct domains across the web, and Google trackers appeared on 348,059 of them.

Google Analytics was used by over 71 per cent of the domains, Google AdSense by over 35 per cent, and Google DoubleClick by over 26 per cent.

The study was conducted in March of this year. And preliminary numbers from April indicate that Google trackers appeared on roughly 80 per cent of 766,000 distinct domains on the net. The researchers call Google "the most dominant player in the tracking market."

The Register for more details - http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/06/03/go...tracking_study/

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

[Peaches]

Google tracking cookie spans AdSense, DoubleClick

Um, but it keeps the data separate?

By Cade Metz in San Francisco

4th June 2009 20:28 GMT

"Yes, Google is using the same tracking cookie across both its AdSense and DoubleClick online ad contraptions. This allows the Mountain View ad giant to collect your surfing habits as you move from AdSense partner sites to sites using DoubleClick's ad management platform - although the company indicates that at least in some cases, the data is not combined.

"Although we use the same cookie, our data use rights vary per product according to our contracts with our customers," company spokeswoman Christine Chen told us over email.

It's unclear which contracts and which customers Chen is referring too. And although the company says that at least some contracts do not allow it to merge data, it's unclear how the data is separated. If the data is separated as is, it would be trivial to combine it.

Despite our repeated inquires via phone and email, the company has not directly addressed these issues."

The register for more details - http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/06/04/go...leclick_cookie/