Why trackers on Malwarebytes?

[Guest]

Malwarebytes always pursued and pursues to protect their customers against malware. At least by Anti-Malware 2 they did and they still do it in an excellent, praisable and successful way.

Using Ghostery as a browser add on you find several trackers in the subforums of Malwarebytes. According to which subforum you visit the numbers are different.

But to my mind trackers are a little bit similar to malware. Of course they aren't as bad as real malware, but they nose out the web surfing habits of the visitors.

And sometimes promotion add ons of a website  try to install malware or even viruses on the PC of the visitor - own experiences on the websites of other American forums, admittedly seldom, but it happened.

From that point of view Malwareybytes contradicts their own philosophy, i.e. to protect their customers against the threats in the internet..

Are trackers realy necessary on Malwarebyte's websites?

[exile360]

Greetings

The trackers on our websites are only for the sake of figuring out useful info such as which areas of the forums, support articles and products our users are most interested in/find most useful.  We also allow crawlers/bots like Google to index our sites for the sake of improving search references when a user is using a web search to find info about us/our products or something we may have a useful topic or help article about such as a particular threat/infection and how to remove it etc.  We don't do any sort of PUP/malware/advertisement loading or anything like that because that absolutely would be against everything that we stand for.  We also do not associate the info that does get tracked with individual users; it's just blind statistical data that helps us keep track of how often various pages are viewed/visited etc.

Additionally, some of the tracking/cookies etc. come from IPS which is the forum software we use.  As far as I know they do not participate in any malicious activity either, but like us, they do gather statistical data and use cookies, including of course for saving your logon info during/between sessions (unless you delete your cookies of course).

Of course, some users do not wish to have anything tracked or to use any cookies etc. in which case there are options, like the plugin you mentioned among others and each major browser has options on blocking tracking cookies to various degrees (I have my own primary browser, Internet Explorer 11 set to block all cookies and prompt me to allow/block them for each site so I can choose which ones to allow and which ones to keep off my system).  In Chrome I use a plugin called Privacy Badger that shows me all websites trying to track my activities and allows me to select which ones to allow and which ones to block and another called Disconnect which serves a similar function but works a bit differently.

I hope you find this information useful and that it helps to at least somewhat set your mind at ease with regards to the stats/telemetry aspects of our websites.

[Guest]

Many thanks for your detailed and helpful explanation, which placates me (nearly ) completely. 

As already said in my starting reply I use Ghostery and additionally also Privacy Badger, both ones already since a longer time with very satisfying results..

Concerning cookies I have set  similarly like you two of my browsers (Opera and K-Meleon - I suppose the last one is pretty unknown in the U.S) to delete every cookie after every session.

For Firefox and IE I use the program MAXA Cookie Manager. That program  finds ALL cookies including flash cookies and other webbugs and you can delete every undesirable one. By that there are normaly only two cookies on my computer.

Addionally since two and a half years the program AdBlockPlus (ABP) is installed on Opera, Firefox and IE. That's caused by bad experiences by promotion add ons on websites of Autoguide 2.5 years ago, when such promotion add ons tried to install trojaners on my computer, even one time succesfully. But I could remedy it by a complete formating of the main partition and installing a fortunately 7 days before compiled image of that main partition.

Especially by that bad experience 2.5 years ago I am very touchy now towards promotion add ons and similar things, trackers included..

That  was also the reason, why I bought the license of Anti-Malware 2 directly after that incidend.

Edited February 16, 2017 by GMork