Google eyeballs planted on 92% of top websites
Found on The Register on Tuesday, 02 June 2009
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.
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.
"Within the same privacy policy, we often found that a site would say 'We don't share your information with third-parties' but then elsewhere in policy they'd say 'We do permit third-party tracking via web bugs,'" Brian Carver, the professor who oversaw the study, tells The Reg. "To the average web user that's a contradiction."
I don't like being tracked at all. Advertisers like Google might think that they have a reason to monitor my behavior, but there is no reason for me to accept that. That's why domains like "pagead2.googlesyndication.com", "googlesyndication.com", "google-analytics.com" and a few more are in my hosts file and resolve to 127.0.0.1 now.