Do you use the social WordPress plugin called Sexy Bookmarks by Shareaholic? If you look at the bottom of this post, you’ll see that I do and have used it on this blog for a while (even before Shareaholic took them over).
Yesterday, I was working on one of my other sites OnlineCopywriting101.com and noticed that some of the pages were loading really slow and I then noticed the reason. In the task bar of my browser, it said…”Waiting for map.media6degrees.com”! Panic struck me!
Had I been hacked? Did I have malware on my site? Good grief!
So I quickly Googled the site and found some old posts where people were complaining about a plugin called AddToAny that was sending tracking data to this site. I’ve never had that plugin, but I suspected if that social plugin was doing it, maybe others are too.
Further research uncovered a new setting in the Sexy Bookmarks plugin that allows it to send tracking data to Media6Degrees. Besides the fact that it was slowing down my site, I don’t really like the idea of sending tracking data that I have no access to and can put in my privacy policy. So, I’ve turned it off on all my sites that use the plugin.
In case you want to turn it off (or on), here’s how to do it:
- Click the Shareaholic link in your WordPress Admin Dashboard left sidebar
- Look for the Functionality Settings section (see image below)
- Select “No” next to “Track Performance”
- Save Changes
How do you feel about plugins sending tracking data without letting you know?
[UPDATE] There is a new version of Sexy Bookmarks, so read my Sexy Bookmarks Update post.
