Much has been made recently about MyBlogLog‘s problems, but they have an even larger problem looming on the horizon that is 10x larger than anything else they’ve seen.
The Pro stat tracking features of MyBlogLog are similar to other packages — obviously they track clicks on your site. One of the things that MBL has been tracking (that I have only seen on a small handful of other stat packages) is what they call “iFrame ad tracking”, which is essentially tracking clicks that come from inside iFrames on your site. For people who aren’t super geeks, this is a slightly more difficult thing to track because you have to use the DOM to target the iFrame first, then you have to work the magic. With MBL’s case however, they don’t track generic iFrames and the links on them, they specifically target Google AdSense and Yahoo Publisher Network ads, and nothing else.
What’s also interesting is that they didn’t write this code themselves, but rather “borrowed” it from a third-party developer who put it together for Mint users wishing to track AdSense stats. Here’s part of the code:
//start IFrame ad tracking
//from http://www.digitalmediaminute.com/article/1715/adsense-click-pepper
var m_px=0,m_py=0,m_as_frms=new Array(),is_ie=document.all?true:false;
function m_as_init() {
var ad=document.getElementsByTagName('iframe');
for(var i=0;i
m_as_frms[m_as_frms.length]=new Array(ad[i], 'http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com', 'Google AdSense');
if(is_ie){ad[i].onfocus=m_trk_as;}
} else if(ad[i].src.indexOf('ypn-js.overture.com') > -1) {
m_as_frms[m_as_frms.length]=new Array(ad[i], 'http://ypn-js.overture.com', 'Yahoo! Publisher Network');
if(is_ie){ad[i].onfocus=m_trk_as;}
} else {}
}
As you can see they only target links in iFrames which have the signature Google AdSense or YPN domain inside, aka, your AdSense or YPN textual ad links. When someone clicks on one of your site’s text ads, that click gets registered on MyBlogLog’s servers and stored.
“But wait, Mike, isn’t this a *feature* and not a huge issue?” No sir, it is a huge issue. Stat tracking is a feature in the Pro version of MBL however the code that tracks your ads’ clicks is present on everyone’s widget, regardless of if they’re a Pro account holder or not. Since the vast majority of MBL users do not have a Pro account, the vast majority of MBL users do not consider Yahoo/MBL tracking their ad clicks as a “feature” but rather a “WTF@!!!”.
So why did Yahoo purchase MyBlogLog? Many have said it was purely for the eyeballs and the user account numbers, but now it’s becoming clear that by owning MBL user data they now have unfettered access to every MBL user’s AdSense statistics, which could have been the selling point all along.
If you’re using the MyBlogLog widget and don’t want your AdSense stats poured over by Yahoo, you should take it down right now. MBL has yet to discuss this significant ad-tracking problem so until then, consider your private ad data to be a lot less private.