I'd like to request the removal of go-mpulse.net & mpstat.us from your list of trackers as we are not a tracker. More details below.
I see requests were made to add it to the list here, and here.
Our domains show up in easyprivacy_trackingservers.txt as well as a whitelist entry for cnet in easyprivacy_whitelist.txt
To test, visit
https://www.soasta.com/ with an Adblocker.More details
mPulse
https://www.soasta.com/performance-monitoring/ is a performance (website speed) monitoring tool. As a user browses a site, the mpulse script (known as boomerang https://github.com/soasta/boomerang, Free & Open Source Software released under the BSD license) collects timing related information about the web page including, how long it took for the page to load up, how long it took for the first byte, etc. This data is sent back to our servers for analysis, again, only related to performance.We do not collect information (demographic, or otherwise) about individual users. We store a first party cookie to provide backwards compatibility for older browsers that do not support modern performance APIs (eg, IE 7 & 8 ), and to measure average performance across a single browsing session (again, we only collect timing information and no user information).
There are two key points to note here.
1. The use of a first party cookie makes sure that we cannot track users across websites. This was an intentional design decision as we (the opensource developers of boomerang) do not like being tracked, and do not want to enable any consumers of our data the ability to track users.
2. To measure performance across a session, we use a user independent session id that is not reused across browsing instances, so we cannot even track the same user's experience across multiple browsing sessions.
We do receive user IP addresses (a side effect of the way TCP/IP works), but again we do not use this to track a user. We do use the IP to aggregate performance (latency numbers) about ISPs, and this is to help our customers identify performance regressions or bottlenecks that may be isolated to a certain ISP.
Our customers use the data that we gather to improve the performance of their websites in a way that cannot be done with synthetic testing tools such as Web Page Test. Blocking our URLs affects our customers' visibility into performance problems, and their ability to fix them. For example, think about trying to buy something on an e-commerce site, but the site being unavailable due to performance issues. Yes, the site suffers a loss of a customer, but the customer also suffers a loss of a possibly scarce item, like movie tickets, or limited edition plush toys. Our data helps our customers identify these performance problems quickly, as they happen, and remedy them, all without the need to track individual users.
I'm happy to answer any questions you may have, and if there's any way in which you believe we might be unintentionally tracking users, please let us know and we'll take steps to stop doing that.
Thank you,
Philip Tellis
Creator of Boomerang & Architect of mPulse