Saturday, July 31, 2010

Phew …scary, or self interest?

harmfull
I was greeted today with this error message, as I tried to view this blog. Yikes this is not good. So how did something potentially nasty as, bin.clear whatever get onto my blog. Why is chrome warning me? I didn’t put it there! Or so I thought…
Turns out CleaSpring is a virally distributed platform to enable widgets to be able to set up on private web pages, blogs and social network site. And I had such a widget for displaying my geotagged photos down on the right hand side column, was the culprit. I gather the sinister bit that Bin.clearspring.com has a tricky flash embed that allows them to track and then aggregate what you are viewing (and then onsell this to advertisers) So it is dangerous a SuperBug?, as the message suggests or is it google not wanting others to be able do better than its own analytics and adsense? Who cares? I don’t like things that collect private info, especially when they don’t tell you and I don’t want my readers being scared away but nasty looking warnings, so no more "free" widgets for me (at least for a while).

The geotagging widget map is gone, If you like seeing where my geotagged photo are taken you can still check out my flickr map (without any warnings).

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