Daily Mail ‘exposed’ as serial online data-collector

A PR blogger has exposed the array of web analytics and online tracking tools used on the Daily Mail’s website – on the same day that the paper “revealed” how some companies use social media sites to track down unhappy customers.

In an article explaining how firms “spy” on customers’ Facebook accounts and “trawl the internet looking for disgruntled customers”, the Mail listed telecoms provider BT, EasyJet, Carphone Warehouse and Lloyds TSB as companies that were “monitoring social networking sites to see what is being said about them”.

It goes on to tell the story of an unnamed consumer who called the telecoms firm a “bunch of unaccountable, business-shafting bastards” on his Facebook account. This unhappy customer was contacted “within hours” by a BT representative through the site, offering to help him with the problems he had been encountering.

BT’s efforts were not well received, however, and the unhappy customer told the Mail: “What happened was quite Big Brother-ish and sinister.”

But blogger Andrew Bruce Smith, who runs the PR and analytics consultancy Escherman, sought to take the paper to task with a report on his own site that detailed the range of web analytics and tracking software used by the Daily Mail – including tools from Omniture, Sophus3, Google Analytics and ComScore – to gather information about its readers.

With tongue firmly in cheek, Smith said: “The amount of information that the Mail is gathering about its online readers is immense – everything from the kind of browser they are using down to their IP address. There can be no doubt that they are openly using this information to try and personalise their readers’ experience or – worse – coerce them into buying third-party products and services.

“We can only hope that their own journalists will apply the same rigorous approach as they’ve used with other organisations to write a follow-up story to expose their own colleagues’ questionable behaviour and flagrant disregard for privacy.”

The Daily Mail had not returned calls seeking comment at the time of publication.