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Do Not Call Site Has AT&T Stats Tracker?

Posted by simoniker on from the ring-ring-doh dept.

hookedup writes "The Register is carrying an article about suspicious content at the FTC's Do Not Call site. It has been a runaway hit with US consumers, with over fifty million signing up to avoid spam calls from telemarketers. But the web site hides a little secret: a 1x1 pixel image tracking visitors... and where does the trail lead but to the AT&T, one of the most persistent telemarketers." However, the tipster, James 'Kibo' Parry, notes: "There isn't any evidence proving they _are_ up to anything improper, but this relationship between the FTC and AT&T fails to avoid the potential for impropriety."

6 of 323 comments (clear)

  1. AT&T has the server logs! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The article says, "The FTC confirmed that AT&T Managed Services is its contractor, and hosts the website."

    They don't need a 1x1 image to track usage... they have the server logs!

  2. AT&T is a huge corporation by dcocos · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I'd be willing to be that AT&T hosting people don't even know that the AT&T phone people exist.

  3. Ahem... by inertia187 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Will someone please tell me what would prevent a telemarketing company outside the US from obtaining this very accurate list of phone numbers?

    --
    A programmer is a machine for converting coffee into code.
    1. Re:Ahem... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Nothing, considering they will be getting it on cd from the FTC in order to comply with the program if they are conducting buisness within the US, just like every other telemarketing company.....

  4. Its to count the number of people w/o javascript.. by molo · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Here is the snippet from the page http://www.donotcall.gov/ Note that the img tag is embedded in the noscript tag. That is, this img is only loaded in graphical browsers that don't use javascript. Since AT&T has the government contract to implement the DNC list, I don't think there's anything sinister going on here, they just want a count of the number of users that don't use/enable javascript.

    -molo

    <noscript>
    <img BORDER="0" NAME="DCSIMG" WIDTH="1" HEIGHT="1" SRC="http://g6589dcs.nyc2.aens.net/DCS000003_6D4Q/ njs.gif?dcsuri=/nojavascript">
    </noscript>

    --
    Using your sig line to advertise for friends is lame.
  5. Re:Off by a power of ten? by letxa2000 · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Yeah, well to me the amazing thing in the story is that the government apparently paid AT&T $3.5 million to build the website. Have you visited the website? I've built more complex websites in a matter of weeks. Even charging $200/hour that would be easily less than $32k.

    I would hope that "building" the site for $3.5 million also includes running it, ongoing maintenance, etc. Because if the government really paid AT&T $3.5 million to BUILD it and still has to pay some ongoing fee, they got ripped by an order or two of magnitude.

    Government waste isn't surprising, but it's sad when it is made so obvious. A good percentage of the folks here at Slashdot could have done just as good a job for a fraction of the cost and STILL recorded a very good year income-wise.