Is mixpanel.com Safe?

Spam Advertisers: ***** ***** ***** ***** mixpanel.com mixpanel.com/engage/unsubscribe/1236714/95149/2141982 ***** *****

14/09 From: Sergie from Webflow ***** Sender: "Sergie from Webflow" <hello=webflow.com@*.datadrivenemail.com> http://api.mixpanel.com/track? ***** *****

Website analytics engines in general are not a bad thing. There's value in knowing where a particular user came from (Google [plus search terms], link on another web site, etc.), knowing which page they landed on, where they went from there, and how long visitors appeared to have spent on a given page. That can all be done anonymously. However, from the mixpanel.com home page: Improve retention. See if changes to your product or marketing improves customer retention. Get to know your customers. Tie data to your customers so you can see who they are and what they have done in your app. Keep your customers. Automatically send email or push notifications to your customers and increase engagement. Those sorts of tasks can only work effectively if they have really good tracking of individual users (or at least individual accounts, IP addresses, etc.). That part is not so palatable.

What’s most unique and concerning about Mixpanel from a privacy perspective is that they advertise that they can tie their incredibly detailed tracking data to specific individuals. Although it happens and it’s certainly been done before, advertisers typically don’t admit it: they focus on data being aggregated and “de-identified” and thus lacking privacy risks (which isn’t always true, but that’s the industry stance and one of their key talking points). Mixpanel is coming right out and marketing its tracking tools based on the ability to identify individuals. On their website, they say “Now you can tie any kind of data to your users to see exactly who they are and what they have done.” Use tools like DoNotTrackMe to block those jerks: *****

http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=mixpanel.com https://www.siteadvisor.com/sites/mixpanel.com http://www.wmtips.com/tools/info/?url=mixpanel.com http://hosts-file.net/default.asp?s=mixpanel.com