A quick update about the WordPress.com Stats plugin secretive inclusion of Quantcast tracking:
- Automattic’s CEO proudly blogged about the huge leap Quantcast sees in the usage of sites in the Automattic network as from November and confirms self-hosted wordpress blogs are now considered part of Automattic’s network:
the bump you see in November is when we started tracking Polldaddy, ID, Gravatar, and WordPress.com Stats users in addition to WordPress.com visitors
- A German law-firm that seems to specialize in internet, law and privacy wrote about Automattic’s Quantcast tracking, claiming that using the Stats plugin migth put you at risk of legal action. I’m not a lawyer, but privacy laws in Germany (and Europe as a whole) are a lot stricter, so self-hosted bloggers should be careful when installing plugins that include tracking.
- My little DoNotTrack plugin got downloaded quite a few times this last month. Maybe I should iron out the quirks, make it a bit more generic and see if I can get it listed on the wordpress.org plugins repository?
