Interesting People mailing list archives
IP: We know where your looking -- from RISKS
From: Dave Farber <farber () cis upenn edu>
Date: Thu, 29 Apr 1999 04:36:05 -0400
Date: Sun, 25 Apr 1999 15:21:14 -0500 From: "Richard M. Smith" <rms () pharlap com> Subject: What's DejaNews up to? One of my favorite Web sites is DejaNews, the search engine for Usenet newsgroup messages. Yesterday I discovered a new "feature" of DejaNews which I don't understand. It seems that when a newsgroup message containing URL's is displayed, the DejaNews server is silent changing the links to be routed through the DejaNews servers. This new feature allows DejaNews to track when a person clicks on a Web site link in a newsgroup message. You still get to the Web site, you just go through the DejaNews servers first. My understanding is that the new feature was added a couple of months ago. Here is a quick example of what DejaNews is up to: Original link: http://www.yahoo.com Tracking link: http://x12.dejanews.com/jump/http://www.yahoo.com Apparently the DejaNews servers simply redirect your browser to the real URL after recording where you clicked. In the newsgroup message itself, the original link is shown, not the tracking link. An easy way to defeat this tracking mechanism is to manually copy the link in the message text to the location or address window of your browser. I ran a simple experiment and found that a Web site will still get the referring URL which is the URL of the newsgroup message. So one thing that DejaNews is not trying to do is block Web sites from knowing where a click came from. Pretty obviously, DejaNews knows a lot about me already by my searching habits. Why do they now also need to know what Web sites I'm visiting? What is being done with this information? Pretty odd if you ask me. What I can't figure out is what DejaNews is up to here. Does anyone have any ideas? Richard M. Smith <smiths () tiac net> [Added note: It gets more interesting. DejaNews is also tracking e-mail addresses. When one clicks on an e-mail address in a newsgroup message, it first goes thru the DejaNews server before being redirect as a mailto: URL. DejaNews ends up know who and when someone is sending e-mail to. This is just plain weird.] Here is more info from comp.security.misc: donoli wrote:
Exactly. Since they are chaining the URL, they get credit for bringing users to the second site.
Yep, Web sites with high click-thru rates get called first by their friendly DejaNews ad rep! Maybe the next step here for DejaNews is to somehow figure out how to charge Web sites for click thru's. Toll booths on the Internet? For example, maybe DejaNews only highlights links for Web sites that have DejaNews accounts. Each click-thru then costs a dime. Why DejaNews went through all of the trouble to also track e-mail makes no sense at all. It's just plain rude. I've asked their privacy people and PR people what's going on. Hopefully they'll get back to me today. BTW, According to Junkbusters.com, the hotbot search engine also does the same trick for Web sites. They are tracking click-thru's in search results. None of the other major search engines (AltaVista, Yahoo, Lycos, and InfoSeek) appear to be doing this. Richard
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- IP: We know where your looking -- from RISKS Dave Farber (Apr 29)