And these "tracking servers" are 1) comScore: measures how many unique visitors visit our site each month. This data is crucial for ad sales, as "bigger sites get more" applies. 2) OpenX is our own ad server that delivers the ads to our site and the "tracking" is actually a cookie with random number in it that recognizes you for the ad server for capping purposes. I.e. we might have a campaign running that is capped so that one visitor only sees that particular banner once and on other page loads, other ads will be delivered instead. Thus, the cookie is set to your browser so that the ad delivery mechanism knows that you are you 3) Quantcast provides public audience data, i.e. how many people visit the site. Our data is available here: AfterDawn @ Quantcast. Those paranoid "we will scare you to death" net monitoring apps remind of those good olde times back in 1997 when I started working on web development and people had their browsers' javascript turned off, as "it could steal my stuff"... Same logic. To put it simple: we don't want or provide anyone's personal data to anyone -- having a rep on Internet that you do something stupid with people's personal data equals death sentence to your site's popularity
