I notice on some websites a little rainbow-type box which say ‘site meter’ underneath it.
What info do they reveal about you? Do they reveal your IP number, location, email address?
Are they the reson I get spam mail?
I don’t see how a box could get your address and email address.
Well, the box is just a little graphic indicator for the site meter program.
I used to have trackers on one of my sites. For the site owner, it provides IP address, operating system, browser & version, time zone the visitor is from, domain the visitor is from. No other personal identification, at least with the types of site trackers I used. I just wanted some idea if anyone at all was even visiting my site, after I knew people were actually looking, I got rid of it.
I used the rainbow looking one (Site Meter) and the planet with the checkmark one (Extreme tracking).
If you use Outlook (express or paid version) and Internet Explorer, then Internet Explorer will indeed happily give out your e-mail address to anybody who asks for it.
::shivers::
This, by the way, is just One More Reason not to use Outlook. 
Server logs in general though do give handy dandy information like referrals and what not, but people who do not want to sort through all of that information (or who do not have access to it, such as on a lot of free web hosting services) and correlate it into any sort of meaningful statistics can sign up for any number of statistics generating services which will take hit information (amount of users who visit your site by opening page VS say some article you have written on your site) and put it into nice Handy Dandy Bar Graph Format for you.
That and they also sort data by day, week, month, year, and so forth, and can help to show you trends.
“After a link exchange program was established with such and such site traffic went up by an average of an additional 50 visitors a day for a week, and then started reducing down to its normal levels until it eventually stabilized at an additional 10 visitors a day.”
Stuff like that, though you have to know how to interpret the data yourself, having it in a pre done easy to read graphical format makes data interpretation a lot easier.
They can also log http_referer which is where you came from. That can be really useful, because it shows where hits are coming from and what searches are ending up at your site.
Most attentive webmasters watch the referers and make pages that fit the search terms better. It’s one of the secrets of good search placing.
Doh, forgot to mention that. (was what originaly inspired my post too, heh)
This can at times be dangerious, since some websites store things like your user ID and PW in the URL you use to access that site (not safe!). Hotmail got in trouble awhile by allowing anybody to access anybody elses messages just by typing in the proper URL.
And kicker is, it seems like even when you type in a URL into your address bar directly, the URL you came from is still sent (though I do not think it is in the same manner as when you click a link, since pages like Geocities do not complain if you directly enter the URL of an image to look at it, but I have seen site demonstrations where I entered the sites URL directly into my URL bar and it knew what the site I was just at was, icky)
I’d answer this differently:
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The number counter is yet another frill that wannabe programmers add to Web pages in a lame attempt to show their page really does something, and that they really CAN program.
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Statistics can be gathered without the “meter” showing, so often the meter is there just because “Web Tutorial .001” includes it. (And it’s FREE! wow… really… …)
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The Web meter is a show off device: “Look how many people visit, MY page. MINE, MINE, MINE! I’M THE CENTER OF ATTENTION” It’s one of those things that just makes you stop and think how important the Internet really is.
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The Web meter is a legitimate tool for browsers to see whether a page has wide appeal, and therefore, whether, they’re likely to be interested. If nobody’s been there in years, ya have to wonder.
Thanks for the responses all. partly_warmer, are you talking about the counter on a webpage or the site meter?
They’re roughly equivalent, in terms of importance (or lack thereof). When counters are free, as they are in most ISP accounts for their regular customers, one free counter is given. Naturally, knowing use on the basis of each Web page is preferable, so those (very common) Web site hosts are forced to decide which page they think most important. Usually they opt for their “home page”.
For Web site owners, one of the biggest problems is figuring out what the heck people are doing at a site. There are more useful tools than counters, but basic questions persist:
- Why has somebody come?
- Did they get what they wanted?
- Could the site be changed to give them more of what they wanted?
It’s a two-edged, razor sword problem. If this user information was readily available to the 90% of people who, like SDBMers, are Web site owners trying to share their ideas and thoughts, the Internet would be better. Unfortunately, commercialism means that collecting this sort of information would end up in calls to people’s personal e-mail accounts, etc. Which is not something the counters, as such, do now. So the counters remain. Inept, but inoffensive.
It sounds as if, especially in his first post, he’s talking about counters.
What you saw, the little rainbow box, was a site meter from, apporpriately enough, sitemeter.com.
If you want to see what it shows, click here (no, it’s not a hack job, SM gives users the option of having their meter results be public, and some users actually choose to do so).
There are other, more comprehensive meters out there, and most webhosts provide traffic recording tools of their own. SM has pretty much everything I need, though I know I used another source (either another meter, which I played around with for a while or my webhost’s traffic monitoring tools) that reported the length of each visit/page view.
For a small site, such as mine (see sig), the site meter stuff is largely for my own amusement only (there have also been SDMB threads to this effect if you want to search for 'em), though since “referral” pages usually show web searches that brought people to your page (when applicable), it can be used to influence your content to bring up more hits.
More than you ever wanted to know, huh? 
KKBattousai, you’re a STAR!
That’s exactly what I wanted to know!
Thanks mucho! 