Fighting Marketing Drones Over 3rd Party Web Tracking?

Web Sawy asks: "I work for a large-ish company (4000+). We have a number of disparate divisions and, believe it or not, varying knowledge on How Technology Works. It was brought to my attention that one part of the corporate website has been using 'a third party tool' to 'compare the performance of individual ads'. In other words, some external party is tracking user surfing habits. How does one go about educating co-workers on the evils of these third party services, which are currently 'helping' the Marketing department? What technologies are people using to do this type of reporting to help the Marketing department generate their numbers? In the world that I live, I can't even see those third-party ads (or hidden images!). I certainly can build my own user tracking system using existing technologies but before I fight that major uphill battle, I wonder if Slashdot readers would share their insights."

Comments

Why they do this

[dacarr]

You are not marketing. You did not go to school to be in marketing. Therefore, according to Marketing, you don't know shite from shinola. It doesn't matter if you have a doctorate, have coded C for 20 years, scored 300 on a standard IQ test, taught yourself Perl, MySQL, PHP, HTML, ASP, Java, and C, or cut your teeth on a PDP-10, you are an imbecile because you can't (or won't) sell.

Therefore, you have to bite back if you want this to be done. My suggestion is to build the applet, install it, let it run for a few weeks, and demonstrate the results at the next meeting. If you can prove you can do it for less money, you can look favorable to the higher ups. Marketing will still look at you, the puny code geek, through their noses, but you will also have the satisfaction of beating them.