Look ebayaintstupid, not all web beacons or so called tracking bugs are bad. They're mainly used to see if you open an email, if you click on a link, or on a website, who your referrer was, what browser you're using, how long you're been on a page, which pages you're viewing.. etc
They're mainly used to help monitor how well email campaigns are doing, or which pages of a website are more popular.
Aspkin.com has three pieces of tracking software.
If you view the source of my blog homepage, aspkin.com, look towards the bottom of the code.
<script id="stats_script" type="text/javascript" src="http://metrics.performancing.com/wp.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://s28.sitemeter.com/js/counter.js?site=s28aspkinstats">
<script language=JavaScript src='http://www.aspkin.com/astracker/ast.php'></script>
One is sitemeter stats, another is metrics stats, and other is for adwords tracking.
The adwords tracks if someone clicks on a Google ad of mine I'll know about.
The other two monitor how many people visit the site, where they came from and other details.
It's not bad; most websites have some type of tracking scripts to keep track of website traffic. Even using beacons as images, is the same thing. I've used them before in my mass email campaigns. I just sent an email to 90k past customers of mine about a week ago with a beacon and link scripts. They're only used for email tracking purposes.
EBay uses this in the same way.
I'm on the fence about eBay using cookies in emails, because I don't remember having problems in that way. I'm only going off what the masses are saying about them.
Just some more information on the subject,
-Aspkin
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