On The Trail

Eric Peterson from Jupiter Research comments on this article in the SF Examiner. The article talks about how online tax preparation sites like TurboTax or H&R Block are using third party tools (in this case Omniture and WebTrends) to track how folks are using their sites. The main focus is on how these tools could be collecting all your intimate tax info. Matt Belkin from Overture has a nice quote that I’ll bet was taken out of context:

“We could capture your name, your Social Security number or any other information that you willingly pass to a Web site,” acknowledged Matt Belkin

He probably wishes he had ended the sentence “…that the website chooses to send to us”, since that is a bit more accurate and less sinister. The article makes it sound like the analytics companies have full run of their client’s websites. They really only can get what the client chooses to send them, so the onus is really on the website to follow it’s published privacy policy.