Intervirgil - Tracking you whereever you go!

[Johand]

Does anybody know whether intervigil is a good company or a bad company? I came across them because certain SA sites (MTN an example) have Javascript that downloads a 1x1 picture from their site.

They claim on their website (www.intervigil.com) that they have "strict privacy policies" but is it really ethical to involve a third party without your knowledge that keeps tracking lists. What bothers me is the phrase:

"
When you visit a website maintained by one of our solutions, either to read pages or download information, we automatically collect and store the following non-identifying information:
· Internet protocol (IP) address
· Type of browser, operating system and desktop settings
· Date and time this site is accessed and duration
· Pages visited
"

It does identify you personally - they can use heuristic analysis from all their clients, and with a bit of extra information they can link it to personal information like name, id etc. They can built a quite accurate picture of your surfing behaviour as well.

They also place a cookie on your machine.

What bothers me most is the fact that their clients do not give any indication that you will contact a third party.

I will block *.intervigil from now on, because I'm just not in the mood to have all my surfing habits on the servers of a single company.

[thisgeek]

Actually, it's intervigil.com

[Johand]

Thanks :-) Intervirgil does sound dumber though!

[mancombseepgood]

NOw I seem to be having problems loading MTN Active... hmmm...

[stoke]

Well picked up Johand.
We use a similar system with out corporate websites.
It's just soo much simpler to use an external system like this instead of writing code in each page to track the popularity of the page.

We use it as an admin and success and performance rating aiding tool.
i.e. Admin = removing pages no longer visited and cleaning the site, possibly making changes to extremely popular pages [e.g increasing advertising costs on said page]
i.e. Performance rating = the peep who wrote and marketed their article is rated on unique visits recieved to their article.

The problem with recording "unique" visits is that you have to try to record the IP Address of the visitor, but that's not good enough, companies have 50 people accessing that same page from the same IP address, so now how do you distinguish between different users on the same ip, a cookie.

The amount of data collected is huge and we purge it 2 monthly.

Got a better - non-intrusive idea ? You could just be a kajabazillionaire !

[Johand]

I don't have a better idea - but 'n nice little picture saying that you are actually sending data to a third party would be nice. There is no link of any kind to tell you exactly what has happened and what the privacy policy is. And technically Intervigil must supply you with the information they collected from you if you request it - I'll take a bet that they wouldn't be able to do that.