Shedding some light on "dark social"

Re:Shedding some light on "dark social" by nostromo on Monday October 15, 2012 @04:52PM (#4657109)

That's definitely not to spec if the browser is doing it. http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2616#section-15.1.3

"Clients SHOULD NOT include a Referer header field in a (non-secure) HTTP request if the referring page was transferred with a secure protocol."

However, it's possible that Facebook is passing users through an HTTP gateway.

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Re:Shedding some light on "dark social" by vikrum on Monday October 15, 2012 @04:56PM (#4657127)

It looks like the intermediate 301's referer is being passed thru (For example, all links on Twitter get wrapped as a t.co link, and that's what shows up on the server). I'd imagine that analytics being mined are intelligent enough to collapse twitter.com and t.co as the same social origin.

Give it a try yourself: https://twitter.com/vikrum5000/status/256898972478763008 Note the protocol.

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