[wp-hackers] Advantage (or not) of hosting badges

[Marci O'Daffer]

This isn't a WP issue, just a general question to which I haven't been able
to find an answer.

I have a site that wants to have some level of privacy protection in terms
of who they give permission to use their badges, so it seems  like putting
them out in the open is a bad idea. They could be on a private page....there
are lots of options I realize....but I keep wondering about how I sometimes
see "you MUST use my HTML to link to this badge" -- and I haven't been able
to figure out if they are doing some kind of tracking -- which would be a
nice feature for this site. Can anyone tell me the advantage of hosting
images and insisting people link to them? In the past that was always a
no-no because of bandwidth usage.

Any insights would be appreciated!

Marci :)