What's the story with the new _utma, (etc) cookies?

[bdpics]

More tracking cookies from Pnet......

 

I'm assuming they are part of the Google Urchin/Analytics program, but

I'd like to know more.

 

1. Do I need to accept the _utma, _utmz, etc. tracking cookies in

order for the Pnet site to function properly with my browser?

 

2. These tracking cookies are classified as "1st party" does that mean

that the information collected via the use of these cookies stays at

Pnet, or is this information then passed on to one or more 3rd

parties/affiliates, etc.?

 

3. Do these tracking cookies track only what I do while I'm visiting

the Pnet site, or are they used in conjunction with other

software/cookies/partnerships/affiliates to track my websurfing at

other websites as well?

 

Many thanks,

 

BD

[mottershead]

The cookies are set by the http://www.google-analytics.com/urchin.js script for Google analytics. Since the script is running in the context of a page that came from photo.net, they are "photo.net" cookies and are sent on subsequent requests to the photo.net server. The photo.net server does not do anything with the cookie values. The values are written into our logs, like all cookies sent to our servers, but we don't do anything with this information, and any use of the information that we might contemplate would be subject to our privacy policy.

 

The cookies in question can be read only by scripts running in the context of photo.net pages, including subsequent executions of urchin.js, but they would not be sent to any other web servers. That means that the information in the cookie would not be accessible to the servers of another web site that you visited. For example, the cookies could not be used by another web site that you visited to determine that you had been on photo.net.

 

If you download the urchin.js script and read it, you will see that it uses the cookie values to compute some statistics, which it sends to the Google Analytics server by means of fetching some dummy gifs from the Google server and putting the computed statistics on the URL's as arguments. You can read the Google Privacy Policy and Google Analytics Terms of Use to see what Google might do with this information, but it is intended to provide photo.net with web site traffic information.

 

It would not affect your browsing of photo.net to block these cookies. The only effect of your blocking the cookies would be to slightly reduce the accuracy of the Google Analytics statistics for our site.