Shareaholic Spyware Updates Spamming Every Day

It has gone from “OK” to bad to worse with this plugin over many months. I’m deleting shareaholic from all sites I admin and recommend other WordPress admins do the same.

#1 The plugin is loaded with spyware I found out after researching why the authors would update so often. The plugin sends data to adnxs.com, DataXu, Bluekai, shareaholic.com, and probably more, who knows. The authors acknowledge this saying the user tracking is for “analytics” but it is actually more about giving personal data to other companies to monetize. Shareaholic is a desperate “startup” so this is what they do.

#2 Too many updates. Shareaholic was updating once a month (OK fine) then they were spamming every week. And now it is Every. Single. Day.

#3 They hijack shares and steal your visitors away by having them sign up for a shareaholic.com account. Funny because for a while I didn’t know the plugin started doing this until I was tipped off.

Looking at all the other bad reviews I’m not alone, and a quick trip to google shows that shareaholic is a company with a history of spying and user complaints.

Browsing the forum I see they just made an option to turn some of the unwanted crap off yet the crap is still on by default and had to be discovered and complained about in the first place. You can try to disable each cruddy option but with all the “miscellaneous” updates you won’t know what new spy “features” you are going to get from shareaholic and its affiliates.

This has been a lesson to not trust a plugin by a “startup” especially one that you need to “opt out” of. Do your research. Don’t bother playing cat and mouse with bad plugins like this one.