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According to Keynote Systems, an analysis it did of online behavioral tracking on 269 top websites across four industries - "news & media," "financial services," "travel & hospitality," and "retail," -- showed that 86% of the sites place one or more third-party tracking cookies on their visitors.
Keynote Systems, whose long-time services include performance-monitoring of websites, also says its study shows that 60% of these third-parties had at least one tracker that didn't promise to comply with at least one common tracking standard. Keynote says that of the 211 third-party trackers it identified, "only one committed to honor a visitor's request not to be tracked via the new 'Do Not Track' feature." This gives consumers a way to opt out if being tracked. Keynote says it also checked to figure out if there was a "promise to anonymize data."
Keynote Systems says the tracking phenomenon is all about advertising and revenues that websites can pull in.
"Behavioral advertising, a common use of third-party tracking data, is an increasingly common practice on the Web and one of the primary ways websites fund their operations. Third-party trackers place cookies on the browsers of site's visitors to track a user's clicks and path through the Web. They can also make note of things like what the visitor buys and where the visitor goes once they leave."
Ray Everett, Keynote's director of privacy services, says it all reflects a "'wild West' mentality" and that "aggressive tracking companies" could be placing website publishers in a difficult position and even exposing them to legal risk. But he points out the "burden of policing third-party trackers falls squarely on the shoulders of website publishers" because they are clearly responsible for their content and brand reputation.
Ellen Messmer is senior editor at Network World, an IDG publication and website, where she covers news and technology trends related to information security.
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This story, "Study: 86% of Top Websites Expose Visitors to Third-party Tracking Cookies" was originally published by Network World.