ilsoph

are you 100% sure?

wanting to hear what zango had to say, i asked a rep today about this and he told me that they do NOT replace cookies or anything of the sort... he said that MetricsDirect's (aka 180solutions) advertising engine *may* popup the same site that the surfer gets linked to or open on their own.. but according to him and literature he provided, no referral information is overwritten.. and the reason for opening up a similar/competitor site is because of *their* affiliates which bid on keywords, urls, etc... (and yes they allow sponsors to bid on their own sites - which has interesting implications if referral info is overwritten...)

will i sent you an email yesterday wanting to discuss this with you but you haven't replied yet..

the rep informed me (and as spacekadet said) they were sued 2 years back for similar accusations... he then forwarded me 2 documents, the first of which is a management assertion that
1. they don't alter, manipulate, or delete 3rd party affiliate referral tracking info
2. they don't capture personal info
3. they don't access, collect or transmit data on the affiliate network servers

the second document is an statement from an independent 3rd party consultant which audited MetricsDirect's advertising engine "AMS".. and the report came up clean.. fyi, both documents date around spring of 2005

in light of that, i'd still like to get to the bottom of this... will/missie or anyone else interested i can pass on these documents to you... 16739924 is my icq..

we need to test if zango is actually rewriting referral info, as popping up another window of the same site proves nothing.. shouldn't be too hard.. just proxy the target site... kinda like "man in the middle" attack and intercept to see what really gets sent.. someone technical with some time up for an experiment?


ya short cookies is another 'problem' altogether...