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Throwaway account. My company created an analytics product around the ability to track which sites your visitors have visited. It used a different and (at the t
by ithrewitallaway 15y ago
Throwaway account. My company created an analytics product around the ability to track which sites your visitors have visited. It used a different and (at the time) more reliable technique.
About a year after the product launch we were contacted by a powerful washington based lobby group and they wanted to chat. They felt it violated a site visitor's "reasonable expectation of privacy". I agreed. So we pulled the feature and dodged a bullet as this "browser bug" hit the mainstream press a few months later. The feature wasn't a major part of our product's value prop, few of our customers used it and none missed it.
So if you're thinking about basing a startup on this, don't. You will get a call very quickly from organizations much larger than you are asking awkward questions.
- swah 15y agoOpen-source it?
- scottkrager 15y agoSomehow I think with a throwaway account that's probably not likely.
- evan_ 15y agoI'm sure it's the trick where you make a bunch of links to various sites, set a :visited color, and then interrogate all of the links with javascript to see what color they are. It's no longer possible on most browsers.
- code_duck 15y agoI wonder if they have contacted Facebook about some of their practices, which may be similar?
- inconditus 15y agoRelated, an advertising company who was accused of tracking history: http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/node/6695 http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/node/6695