Privacy, Tracking, etc.

I came across this great piece by Sarah Downey, "7 Tips to go Private on Facebook in 7 Minutes", via a link a Facebook friend posted. I went ahead and installed the Do Not Track Plus web plug-in provided free by the author's employer, Abine.com, a privacy company. I thought I'd test out how many external networks the home pages of various news sites - local, national, international, and web-based - reported to. From "best" to "worst", here is what I found:

Site
 Count
0
0
2
7
8
9
9
10
10
12
12
14
15

Now, we have to remember that those counts for Google (and, presumably, Yahoo!) are "artificially" low. Of course they are not sending the information to external sites; they are saving and using it internally - and receiving, rather than sending, data from external sites. The high counts for the newspaper-run sites are not surprising, given the desperate need newspapers have for additional revenue sources now. I was rather disappointed that my long-time favorite, the BBC, sends data to so many sites. Given the quality and extent of their international coverage, I assume they have revenue concerns analogous to the local newspapers. I am quite intrigued by the lack of tracking by Deutsche Welle, Germany's entry in the same international news category as the BBC. Looks like I have a new news source to investigate more thoroughly....

Any interesting finds about tracking by other news sites?

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