There may be room for a little nuance here.  We can try to interpret DNT as a strict "do not collect anything" flag by default, and say from the start that it may be necessary to ignore it in some rare cases when we need access to data from IE10 users or similar.  This creates a little extra work for us to communicate about those exceptional cases, but it may allow us to move forward here.  I think I can safely assume we will recover any time lost in future communications by wrapping up this discussion sooner than later :)

To Leila's point, I think this solution would not cover apps and so we would still maybe want to move towards an all-encompassing opt-out feature.  From the user point of view, "opt-out" could look consistent in web and apps.  When the user clicks on the web version we could explain how DNT works in their browser and the special strict interpretation we use.  On apps, we could have our own implementation similar to DNT.  In both cases, I think we'd have a great opportunity to link to some landing page where people can find our research.  Win win :)

On Friday, January 16, 2015, Aaron Halfaker <ahalfaker@wikimedia.org> wrote:

Ah.  I think I see the confusion.  When I referred to knowing whether the software "works" for a group of users or not, I'm talking about something more than technical requirements.  Even software that is technically functioning can fail to serve its intended purpose.  The work we do with field studies surfaces this.  That's the point I was trying to make with the anon example.

What I find concerning is the idea that a biased subset of our users would be categorically ignored for this type of evaluation.  If you agree with me that such evaluation is valuable to our users, I think you ought to also find such categorical exclusions concerning.

On Jan 15, 2015 6:38 PM, "Aaron Halfaker" <ahalfaker@wikimedia.org> wrote:
Christian, I appreciate your response, but if you only say how I misunderstood you without suggestion how I might have understood you better, I don't see a way to continue the conversation.  

On Thu, Jan 15, 2015 at 2:48 PM, Christian Aistleitner <christian@quelltextlich.at> wrote:
Hi Aaron,

On Thu, Jan 15, 2015 at 09:23:13AM -0600, Aaron Halfaker wrote:
> You hold
> a minority opinion that testing software in the field is unnecessary.

Hey, that's not what I've said :-)

And this mis-interpretation of my previous email pretty much makes the
rest of your argument moot from my point of view.

> We're merely disagreeing about whether it is
> good to assume that DNT means [...]

And I respect that we have different opinions about DNT.
No doubt there.

> However, when you say that my work has no value, [...]

???
Again ... I think you're misreading my email.
I never said that your work has no value.


Have fun,
Christian



--
---- quelltextlich e.U. ---- \\ ---- Christian Aistleitner ----
                           Companies' registry: 360296y in Linz
Christian Aistleitner
Kefermarkterstrasze 6a/3     Email:  christian@quelltextlich.at
4293 Gutau, Austria          Phone:          +43 7946 / 20 5 81
                             Fax:            +43 7946 / 20 5 81
                             Homepage: http://quelltextlich.at/
---------------------------------------------------------------

_______________________________________________
Analytics mailing list
Analytics@lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/analytics