It’s official: you can not track your visitors

After almost a year of tinkering with my Donottrack-plugin for WordPress, I’ve requested it to be hosted in the WordPress repositories and uploaded version 0.1.0. So if you’re using Donottrack on your blog, or if you activated this “bonus feature” of WP YouTube Lyte, I propose you give WP DoNotTrack a try and let me know what gives here in the comments or via the contact form?
From the readme:

WP DoNotTrack stops plugins and themes from adding 3rd party tracking code to your blog to protect your visitor’s privacy. WP DoNotTrack uses (a slightly modified) version of jQuery AOP to catch and inspect elements that are about to be added to the DOM and renders these harmless if the black- or whitelist says so.
The current version is blacklist-based and stops tracking by media6degrees and quantserve. This can easily be changed in the javascript though. Future versions will include a WordPress admin-page to change these settings.

2 thoughts on “It’s official: you can not track your visitors”

  1. Nice stuff – you’ve put in a lot of solid work behind the scenes, and the English is very lucid and flawless.
    Sadly, after installing and activating, no options showed up in [settings >Privacy] or anywhere else.
    WP321/installed directly from plugins screen and also tried uploading by ftp – no dice.
    Cheers
    Joel

    Reply
    • Morning Joel; this initial version has no options-page. After installation the plugin is active and stops 2 known trackers (media6degrees and quantcast).
      A future version (0.2.0, out in January if all goes as planned), will have a wp-admin page to choose between black- and whitelist-based filtering and will allow you to specify what is in that black- or whitelist.
      The logic to handle these lists are already in donottrack-default(-min).js, so you could play around with some of these features already by editing the javascript-file.

      Reply

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