Last week, ezboard’s CEO, Robert Labatt, posted an update to his WordPress blog to try to calm down fears about one bit of JavaScript in particular that was being loaded any time someone visited a Yuku board or indeed the ezboard web site as well.

It’s called Urchin and it’s part of the Google Analytics software.

Now, Labatt writes:

“They do not slow the site down or touch any personal information. The information collected is anonymous and aggregated so no-one can determine any information at an individual level.”

That’s interesting. If you follow that link to the Urchin FAQs, you’ll see it says:

“Urchin has five different methods for identifying visitors and sessions, depending on available information. Of these, the patent-pending Urchin Traffic Monitor (UTM) is a highly accurate system that was specifically designed to identify unique visitors, sessions, exact paths, and return frequency behavior.”

Of more interest, perhaps, is this:

“5. Urchin Traffic Monitor (UTM): The last method for visitor identification available in Urchin is the Urchin Tracking Module. This system was specifically designed to negate the effects of caching and proxying and allow the server to see every unique click from every visitor without significantly increasing the load on the server. The UTM system tracks return visitor behavior, loyalty and frequency of use. The client-side data collection also provides information on browser capabilities.

“The UTM is installed by including a small amount of JavaScript code in each of your webpages. This can be done manually or automatically via server side includes and other template systems. Complete details on installing UTM are covered in the articles later in this section.

“Once installed, the Urchin Traffic Monitor is triggered each time someone views a page from the website. The UTM Sensor uniquely identifies each visitor and sends one extra hit for each pageview. This additional hit is very lightweight and most systems will not see any additional load. The Urchin engine identifies these extra hits in the normal log file and uses this additional data to create an exact picture of every step taken by the users. This method also identifies visitors and sessions uniquely so that return visitation behavior can be properly analyzed. While this method takes a little extra time to configure, it highly recommended for comprehensive detailed analytics.”

Now to me, the statement from Labatt seems to be contradicted by what the providers of the Urchin software claim. I wonder who I should believe?