I should also point out that "Toby not knowing who the staffer doing this one, highly specific, very minor piece of data-dogging is" does not equate to analytics not knowing who it is. I don't know what you do for a living but do you tend to give your boss's boss a constant play-by-play, or? ;p. It's documented in Trello just like everything else.On 17 October 2014 16:55, Oliver Keyes <okeyes@wikimedia.org> wrote:It's me. Hi! I'm sort of confused by this.In terms of shady back-alley data dealing, let me set out exactly what happens.
Every week, the signpost emails me a list of articles that have unexpectedly high pageview counts and would be in the top 25, but nobody can quite work out why they're so popular. I go through the logs for the last week (I'd be unable to do this for any queries more than a month ago anyway, since we only keep the unsampled data for that long, but a week is what's relevant here), and pull out a tuple of {ip,referer,user agent,article, requests} for the articles on that list.
These tuples, which exist exclusively on our analytics machines (not even my personal, encrypted work laptop: they're only stored server-side, at all steps in this) are than hand-parsed by me. Can we pin all of the requests for [article], or at least most of them, on a single IP address, or a single {IP,user_agent} pair? Then it's probably a spammer or a spider or an [expletive]. No? Okay, if we sum by referer, do we see a common referer? If so, is that an actual referer or a fly-by-night live mirror? Questions like that.
When I'm done with all of the articles, I email the signpost with "for article1, that looks legit. Article2 is a web crawler I'm going to email and shout at. Article3 is a live mirror. Article4 looks legit. Article5...". These requests are logged on our trello board, just like any other data request from any other party, community or staff. Milowent and the other signposters get zero IPs, zero user agents, and nothing anywhere near that range of information: that stuff doesn't even leave the server. And when I'm done with it, I nuke it so it's not even there.
I hope that clarifies what's happening here. If you have specific questions about what we keep that's obviously more of a question for management.On 17 October 2014 12:27, Jonathan Morgan <jmorgan@wikimedia.org> wrote:Pine, have you considered asking Milowent who they work with on the IP data? I really, really doubt that there is some sort of shady back-alley data dealing going down here. - Jonathan--On Thu, Oct 16, 2014 at 9:52 PM, Pine W <wiki.pine@gmail.com> wrote:Thanks,I am not interested in getting this staff person into trouble. The information that they are providing is useful to the Signpost and certainly seems to be sanitized to a reasonable degree. However, it does concern me that they can access these logs without someone knowing about it, it seems to me that this sort of activity should be proactively disclosed to people in WMF who conduct legal and security reviews, and I hope you will consider what sort of security features are appropriate to make sure that occasions when anyone accesses the raw logs are recorded in a robust manner. I worry that if this one staffer can access logs without the higher-ups knowing about it, it is possible that someone who intends to do unethical activities with WMF's data could also access the logs without being noticed.I am ok with holding those logs for 30 days, although I am a little surprised to hear that this is happening. However, what worries me a bit more is the idea that a staff member can be accessing those logs without that access being recorded. This might be something that you wish to investigate further.Thanks Toby.I understand that IPs are not an especially accurate way to look at unique visitors, but for the purposes of the Signpost's traffic report and the Top 25 I feel that they are reasonable approximations of ways to filter out what appear to be automated requests.
PineOn Thu, Oct 16, 2014 at 9:31 PM, Toby Negrin <tnegrin@wikimedia.org> wrote:Hi Pine --Thanks for this -- it's a challenging topic but one that the Analytics team takes very seriously.I'm not familiar with the IP address review that's referenced in the link. I don't know who the staffer might be. We don't currently calculate unique visitors to anything in Analytics and IP address is not a particularly accurate way to assess unique visitors regardless (due to proxies/NATs/etc).We do store IPs as part of page requests in our raw logs which are deleted every 30 days. This data is kept on a system where access is limited and controlled by the operations team. We're in line with the privacy policy on this.To be clear, we are currently considering mechanisms to count unique "requests" -- we rely on Comscore for this data and for several reasons, primarily related to mobile usage, it's not sufficient to understand our usage patterns. We are putting together some proposals to do this in as limited way as possible and that's respectful to our users. We'll share this with the community when we feel we understand the use cases and trade-offs well enough to discuss in an informed manner.-TobyWe do store the IP address associated with varnish requests as part of the log. This data isOn Thu, Oct 16, 2014 at 8:50 PM, Pine W <wiki.pine@gmail.com> wrote:_______________________________________________Hi again Analytics,
I was under the impression that no records are kept of which IPs access which articles on Wikipedia when no edits are made, but it appears that such records are in fact kept [1].Is this proper? This practice appears to be permissible under the Privacy Policy which states that "We use IP addresses for research and analytics; to better personalize content, notices, and settings for you; to fight spam, identity theft, malware, and other kinds of abuse; and to provide better mobile and other applications."It is possible that this information is relevant for determining the number of unique visitors that Wikipedia gets and that this information is always properly filtered before it gets to the Signpost. However, given recent discussions which I thought said that Wikipedia was not instrumented to track unique visitors, I am surprised to learn that this already seems to be happening and that the situation has been this way for some time, so I would appreciate clarification.I want to emphasize that this question is about clarifying the practice of tracking likely unique visitors by IP. This question is not intended to start flame wars, get people into trouble, or limit the Signpost's access to properly filtered information if there has been a determination that WMF's retention of the raw data is appropriate. There might be appropriate secondary questions about making sure that access to the raw IP access data is carefully contained and secured.Thank you very much,
Pine
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk%3ASerendipodous&diff=629934257&oldid=629932288
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--Oliver Keyes
Research Analyst
Wikimedia Foundation
--Oliver Keyes
Research Analyst
Wikimedia Foundation
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