Many of our programmers and writers agree. We're an advertising-based business (free online news) so I view this as one consequence of that

A small chunk of these are due to social and other 3rd party features, a good chunk plain old analytics tracking, and another small chunk are due to our "brand lift" advertising guarantees (e.g. in some cases its ensured that readers are actually seeing your below-the-fold advertisements before we charge you for them).

That said, yes, more than a few Ghostery hits are so we can, e.g., buy an ad to reach Forbes readers when you're visiting Adweek.com or something. Ghostery is great and a useful instruction tool for showing the "boiling frog" that is pixels.

Tell your programmers to get informed on the safee standard being proposed at iab. Name may change.

My name is Alex Poon. I am the head of engineering at Visual Revenue. Being a provider of analytics and optimization services, it is hard, if not impossible to piggyback on other data providers for data. We pay great attention to user experience of our customers and work to ensure that we don't cause any delay or breakage to their sites. Regarding individual user logs, we delete them immediately after data is aggregated.

Glad to see you guys reading HN too

> I think that's a little excessive, especially for an article about keeping logs.

Well, it's a corporate decision on the part of Forbes, so there's no point in blaming the journalist who wrote this particular article.

maybe you should recommend them some other tracking sites, so that they can add them to their collection ;)