MyBlogLog is really a pretty useful and neat tool for a lot of bloggers. First off it provides limited site visitor stats to bloggers who can not place their own stat tracking software on their blogs, or those who don’t want to deal with the process of installing their own software.

More valuable by far, in my own oppinion, MyBlogLog lets you build a visible community on your blog with the insertion of just a line or two of javascript code. Community building is at the heart of blogging, and anything that helps build that sense of community is a good thing for the blog owner and for the blog’s readers too.

You can see this blogs community here -> Home business Blogging.

A few days ago I downloaded a parasite block list from MVPs. This is a list of domains that you can add to your local hosts file and point them to your local machine by defining the domain as pointing to the ip address 27.0.0.1. So for instance if some site tries to load a doubleclick.net page or script, the entry (127.0.0.1 ad.doubleclick.net) in your hosts file would load the file on your own local webserver instead (some tools for customizing this are provided at MVPs).

Shortly after loading this list into my hosts file, I started seeing problems with MyBlogLog
It wouldn’t load correctly, and I couldn’t log in. I also noticed that my picture was not showing up on blogs i was reading that have the MyBlogLog code installed.

I didn’t inittially tie the two occurances together. It took a few days before i realized what had happened. MyBlogLog was in the parasites file.

I went in and removed the lines that redirect MyBlogLog and everything went back to working. And that might have been all there was to it. But I got to thinking. Why was MyBlogLog in the parasites list?

So I fired off an email to MVPs to ask. here’s the email I sent.

Hi,

I’m wondering why mybloglog.com is included in the hosts file? While it does track, it is tracking it’s own users across each others sites and it isn’t serving any porn or ads.

I just deleted those lines from the file, but I’m curious about the thought behind blocking them.

Dane Morgan

And Mike Burgess actually mailed me back with a reply.

Dane,
Thanks for your feedback …

re: it is tracking it’s own users across each others sites”
Mybloglog looks at reader behavior inside blogs, like what is being read
and where readers go next, delivering information it can sell to web advertisers.

FYI: MyBlogLog is part of the Yahoo Developer Network (advertising)

[Example]
<script type=’text/javascript’ src=’http://track.mybloglog.com/js/jsserv.php?mblID=2006061606541135′>&ly;/script>

The above is typically embedded and it does track *all* users, not it’s
own users … you can view the script safely here:
[LINK]

I will remove the following, but the others will remain for now:
127.0.0.1 www.mybloglog.com

Mike Burgess
Microsoft MVP - Internet Security
“There’s no place like 127.0.0.1″
www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.htm

To be quite fair, what Mike says here is correct. All visitors are tracked and logged by the MyBlogLog code. The question that remains is what purposes are those data being used for. According to the MyBlogLog Privacy Policy it’s this.

Web Beacons

MyBlogLog uses web beacons to understand what users are clicking on across the blogs and other web sites in its network. The information collected through these web beacons is used to find out more about our users, for more accurate reporting, improve the effectiveness of our marketing, and to make MyBlogLog better. MyBlogLog sets a cookie along with its web beacons, see above.

Nothing is mentioned about selling this information to other parties, but since Yahoo now owns MyBlogLog that would make the Yahoo Marketing machine not a third party, right? Now, if you are reading this blog, you are probably a marketer yourself and this doesn’t seem like a big deal, but to a lot of non marketer types it is a huge deal.

here’s the privacy section from the MVPs Criteria Page

Privacy Criteria

1. Does not contain a privacy policy, or uses a 3rd party privacy policy which fails to provide an easily accessible privacy policy that explains data collection and other practices used by the program or site.
2. Does not contain or display an acceptable and enforceable EULA (End User License Agreement)
3. Installs a LSP (layered service provider) without full disclosure and explicit user permission
4. Silently tracks sites visited without user permission, such as by IP address, GUID, email address, name or other identifier such as 3rd party hit counters, web beacons, and or 3rd party Cookies.
5. Tracks Web browsing behavior and transmits this information to a remote server
6. Tracks online activity and matches it to personally identifiable information without clear notice and consent, including but not limited to Web pages viewed or accessed, user selected content, keywords and search terms.
7. Tracks Web browsing behavior via 3rd party Cookies (aka: Data Miners) or requires the user to access another site for the purpose of using an “opt-out” Cookie
8. 3rd party surveys that are part of third-party advertising, marketing, or metrics/measurement networks without full disclosure of information obtained or where this information is retained and with whom this information is shared
9. Collects personally identifiable information without express consent in statements other than the EULA or privacy policy

Sections 5 and 8 would seem to me to place MyBlogLog within the limits of this selection criteria, since the users browsing various blogs are having information about their visits and their machines sent to a third party server, and MyBlogLog states in their privacy policy that part of their purpose is to increase the effectiveness of their marketing through their web beacons.

Personally I don’t think this is all that nefarious. I don’t think it’s automatically a bad thing.

But here’s the larger picture. If we resort to using tools that provide marketing information back to the providing party we will almost force people who do not want to be tracked to use methods shuch as hosts files to block those efforts. This in turn will decrease the value of those tools for tracking our visitors. That’s not good for anybody.

Maybe the only real answer is seperating our tracking tools and our community tools. Community tools should only track community members who have opted in to the tracking, and visitor statistic tools should report directly to our own servers logs, or should be stored by a company who is providing the service strickly as a site metrics service and not making their money by turning our site data into markeing metrics for other parties.

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Dane Morgan wrote this in the late evening: