I figured I'd better make sure my own house was in order if I was going to blog about web tracking! I've reviewed my websites and blogs, and find the following.
Flies & Bikes (this website) - Ghostery doesn't reveal any trackers. Joomla sites do, I think use cookies however.
North Bucks Road Club, Northwood Wheelers and Team Grumpy as for Flies & Bikes, no apparent tracking.
Wonderful Life - this is a Wordpress blog. I identified a few trackers, as follows:
Ghostery identifies the following running on Wonderful Life:
Quantcast – this is associated with the IntenseDebate commenting plugin. Blocking this tracker with Ghostery doesn’t appear to affect the functionality of IntenseDebate.
MyBlogLog – This is associated with the MyBlogLog widget in the main page.
Google Analytics – Possibly the most widely used tracker on the web. I kind of figure that anyone using the web will encounter sites using Google Analytics.
The Team Grumpy Blog - a Google Blogger hosted site, naturally has a Google-related script running, with two others:
Google Friend Connect Seems to enable connections between blog-readers. - Collects data on visitor numbers.
MyBlogLog - as above, associated with a MyBlogLog widget.
Stat Counter - associated with counting site visits.
I advise Firefox users to download Ghostery, a plugin which identifies tracking scripts running on a website. It provides links to further information on those scripts, the vendors’ privacy policy, and offers the option to block these scripts. Noscript is a powerful Firefox plugin that allows blocking of a wide variety of scripts (and is particularly aimed at blocking malicious scripts).