As I’ve mentioned a few times I use ScribeFire, a Firefox plugin, to post to my blog. After tonight’s post I went back to edit the html and saw a single pixel tracking image hidden at the end of my post. I thought my site was hacked at first. I googled “Zemanta” and they seemed legit. I went to ScribeFire’s web site and found this gem on their site (What’s New in 3.2?):
Important: Note that the new Zemanta integration includes by
default an invisible image that is added to your posts to gather
statistics for you. If you do not want to participate in this, you can
disable it from the “Publishing” tab of the ScribeFire settings.
I spent the last hour manually removing this html code from all my posts that had it since February. Not everyone will click to see the details of every release. It should’ve been noted prominently on their main blog. I like the plugin but I don’t like this slimy douchebag move. They shouldn’t insert tracking codes into people’s blogs.