Dodgy Ticketmaster?

One of the (many) great things about living in Melbourne is the spring racing carnival. There's something new this year - admission only by pre-purchased tickets.

It's been a change forced primarily by the popularity of the carnival, which consists of 4 race meetings in the space of 8 days at the Flemington racecourse. In 2006 the total attendance over the four meetings was just over 418,000 people, with nearly 130,000 at Derby Day. With the ever growing crowds, there has - justifiably - been some concern over safety and the upshot being the new ticketing policy.

OK, so that's fair enough. So off to the Ticketmaster website I go to secure a couple of tickets. My instance of Firefox has the invaluable "noscript addon", which provides the ability to allow or disable scripts at any site. Anyway, so I do the standard thing and allow scripts from Ticketmaster, and not from their advertising partners Akamai. Which works fine, until I get to the checkout area.

To cut a long story short you can't purchase from Tickmaster online without allowing the Akamai script to run.

So is Akamai "harmful"? Not really. In all likelihood Ticketmaster are using it to try to help improve the performance of their ticketing web application. But it got me wondering, what do people think about having to accept scripts from 3rd party domains when purchasing? Are the privacy implications enough to care about? In the "phishing era", is this an acceptable practice? Or does nobody care?