Gotta love web bugs. The later part of my programming with Evil Marketing Company(TM) deelad with them, along with a rather ingenius (translation: evil) javascript app. Company signs up, we give them a one-line JS include code to put on all their web pages. What it does it goes through every link, every form, anything that could be acted upon... looked at it's onClick/whatever code, shunted it off to an object and replaced with our code that 1) runs the original code, if any and 2) notified us of any action you made on that page via web bugs. Collecting form data was the big thing here, reporting it to us even if you close the web browser before submitting the data.It also used cookies to track the user's state, but since this was all implemented in JS, the cookie was actually set within the realm of the client's site! This mean it got around IE6's pesky ignore-3rd-party-cookies-by-default thing.The client could go in and design a visio-like diagram of how our shit integrated into their site. IE, user enters shopping cart site, puts something in their cart, then proceeds to checkout. Nowadays the first thing they ask you for is your email address when you check out. Say user puts in email address, but does not finish checkout. Our system sends them an email, giving them an incentive to finish checking out. Say 10% off the purchase. If they leave before an email addess was collected, you may get hit with a popup.Evil. Clever, but evil.
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