WordPress.com

1. interissueforum
   Member
   May 28, 2008, 3:10 PM

   I was reading someone's post here a few days ago about StatCounter, and I went to look at their website. It seemed like a good thing but I didnt register yet.

   Yesterday I was having some problems connecting to my wireless connection and my computer was acting funny. So I installed Spybot Search and Destroy and ran it in Safe Mode.

   I was surprised to see that one (of several) things that came up was called stat counter. I erased all of the things Spybot found.

   I certainly wouldn't want to register with Stat Counter if it was somehow imparting malware/ spyware into my computer.

   I'm not really that technically literate so I'm wondering if anyone else has any comments on this.

2. nosysnoop
   Member
   May 29, 2008, 3:49 AM

   It seems everything has some sort of spyware. Like to collect information for them but not necessarily spying. Like this one site I go to will show the demographics to your site like how many men, women, ages, how much they make a year, if you have children, etc. They get that information from cookies that sees what sites you visit to determine if you're a man or a woman or how much you make or if you have children. Just run all your scans everyday which I do. I also delete every night all cookies, cache, and history from both my browsers.

   Here are the demographics on wordpress.com. Run your url on there to see your blog's demographics. It will show more details if your blog is more than three to four months, enough time for them to collect the information.

   http://www.quantcast.com/wordpress.com

3. sondan
   Member
   May 29, 2008, 4:07 AM

   Wow - that is some site! I don't recall giving up so much info when I signed onto WordPress.
   Big Brother must be everywhere for sure. Thanks for the link nosysnoop.

4. nosysnoop
   Member
   May 29, 2008, 4:12 AM

   But if you could sell ads on your site, that link would help your potential sponsors to see who visits your site more so to determine which ads to place. It's not WordPress. It's just everywhere in the blogosphere. It also helps the blogger to see wh their audience is and maybe do more posts that their audience will like better.

5. windwhistle
   Member
   May 29, 2008, 5:29 AM

   StatCounter uses cookies to gather the stats it compiles for you. I've used it for years on an old website, and it's fascinating to see where my visitors come from, which pages they read, how they found my site (search terms they used), how long they stay, etc. However, since you can't use its full code on WordPress (you can only use HTML), you will miss a lot. You'll still get stats on total visitors, return visitors, length of visit, visitor's IP address, world map showing where the visitors came from. (If you find its cookies on your computer, that's the kind of info they are gathering. If you consider that spying, by all means delete them; but they aren't harmful malware.)

6. interissueforum
   Member
   May 29, 2008, 7:33 AM

   Hmmm... No I dont really consider cookies to be Spyware.

   Stat COunter seemed like a good thing and I intended to sign up. But in fact I didnt even register which is why I was surprised when Spybot found something. Maybe it was just cookies? I guess I can use it and run anti- spyware in the future and see what it says.

7. interissueforum
   Member
   May 29, 2008, 7:38 AM

   Hmmm... No I dont really consider cookies to be Spyware.

   Stat COunter seemed like a good thing and I intended to sign up. But in fact I didnt even register which is why I was surprised when Spybot found something. Maybe it was just cookies? I guess I can use it and run anti- spyware in the future and see what it says.

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