AddThis is tracking your surfer data and may cause your theme to mess up.

We had an issue on one of our sites which has addthis enabled where upon the first page load, you'll notice the header isn't properly aligned to the top.

Upon further digging, it appears there was some flash widget getting embeded into our webpage which had a link back to ClearSpring.com. Weird!? After some research I found out that clearspring owns addthis, so this widget was causing this flash to get added.

Judging by the flash that's embeded you can tell it's a "1pixel" which is commonly used to track surfer data. This means that by embeding the addthis widget you're essentially giving up all your surfer statistics to a data collection company who is probably selling it. Fair enough, they need to get something in return for the use of their widget, but what really irks me is that this embeded flash is messing up my design.

To disable it, additional lines will need to get added into the addthis javascript.

In v.1 of the API, use:

<script type="text/javascript">
  var addthis_disable_flash = true;
</script>

In v.2 of the API, use:

<script type="text/javascript">
var addthis_config = {
  data_use_flash: false
}
</script>

More details can be found here:
http://www.addthis.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=8&p=48657