Technorama

While testing my site earlier I noticed cookies called __utma, __utmb, __utmc and __utmz being set from jguk.org, what was worse was that they lasted until 23 Nov 2007, and had unique numbers in them, like 98208771.

I've found out that they orginated not from my site, but from "http://www.google-analytics.com/urchin.js". This was a free google service I signed up to but couldn't get anything useful out of it as it was using proprietary Adobe Flash files for its display. I already have an http://extremetracking.com/ button visible and a hit counter, so I've fallen back to using that. (These services aren't perfect though, e.g. they record screen size not current browser window size!)

I've removed the code that was setting these unreasonable cookies (practice what I preach eh?), and I suggest you all clear out your cookies from my domain, and consider if you want to clear out these __utm* cookies from other domains too. Another way of achieving the same result is to use the Customise Google extension to Firefox!

Urchin can track every single click on a webpage if the developer sets it up like that, they just add something to the onclick param of the anchor tag like this:

onClick="javascript:urchinTracker ('/directory/file.html");"

It could even be used to see what links people hovered over with by adding the function call to the onMouseOver param.

It's intrusive use of features like this which ruin it for the rest of us who love webpages which are javascript enabled (AJAX etc!). This is going to make people want to selectively block Javascript for certain sites, and then those sites may not function well enough.

Other sites have the same problem, take Ian Brown's Blogzilla as but one example, should anyone really be using Google urchin tracking!?

Labels: Mozilla, Tech