Shareaholic adding Google Analytics Code to my website

  • Resolved Roger

    (@rogermedia)


    11 years, 1 month ago

    Was working on my site and noticed another GA code popping up – UA-12964573-5. This is alarming as it means my sites analytics are being sent to a third party without my permission. Upon further research it appears that this code is being placed by the Shareaholic plugin without clearly identifying that this is what is happening.

    I have now removed this plugin from all of my client websites and will not be using anything related to this plugin creator again. This constitutes a serious breach of privacy by the plugin creator.

    There are other plugins that track information such as the Yoast SEO plugin but they do this in an Opt-In manner and further use a much less invasive approach as you can read about here – https://yoast.com/yoast-tracking/

    Going whole hog and grabbing all Analytics data from a website is well beyond gaining simple insights into what version of wordpress is being used.

    I see that this was brought up 2 years ago – https://www.ads-software.com/support/topic/plugin-sexybookmarks-hidden-googleanalytics-code-in-v329?replies=4 and that the response from the creator was that you can simply turn it off.

    This is something that should be off by default.

    https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/sexybookmarks/

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • HKP

    (@hiskingdomprophecy)

    Hi Roger,
    For what its worth, I’ve been using Shareaholic for a number of weeks now, so checked both posts and pages but cannot find a similar occurrence on my site.
    I have the setAccount’, ‘UA-2060XXXX-X’ only once.
    Under Shareaholics data the closest I get to that is: ‘Shareaholic.init(apikey);’
    FYI, I don’t use their ‘Related Content / Recommendations’ though there tech data on that only refers to an api, not a GA;ID.
    Regards,
    Angus

    I just discovered this today as well. I noticed an additional code (UA-48513475-1) on the site and poked around. I found a list of websites here: https://tools.digitalpoint.com/cookie-search?domain=movies2tv.net&page=3 and noticed that a few of them used Shareaholics. Once I disabled the plugin….the code vanished.

    Bad form on their part, I didn’t see any obvious disclosures on this either.

    Hi Guys – If you update to version 7+ of the plugin, this should be addressed and you should no longer see the GA code in your site (current version is 7.4.0.5). If you’re using version 7 or above, and you’re still seeing the GA code, please let me know!

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • The topic ‘Shareaholic adding Google Analytics Code to my website’ is closed to new replies.