Hi,
recently the report of the KnowPrivacy [1] study - a research project
by the School of Information from University of California in Berkeley
- hit the German media [2].
It came to the conclusion that "All of the top 50 websites contained
at least one web bug at some point in a one month time period." [3]
which includes
wikipedia.org.
This is very troubleing and irritating for some of our (German) users
who are very sensitive to data privacy topics. So I established
contact to Brian W. Carver (University of California) who connected me
to David Cancel, the maintainer of Ghostery, which was used to
identify the web bugs. David wrote me today:
The following web bug trackers were reported to us, on
the following subdomains:
Google Analytics -
vls.wikipedia.org
Doubleclick -
hu.wikipedia.org
Both were seen in yesterday's data so they're recent. We don't receive any
page level information so that's as much detail as we have. Hope that helps.
I wasn't able to track down the Doubleclick web bug on the hungarian
Wikipedia, but Google Analytics web bug is integrated in every page of
the West Flemish Wikipedia via JavaScript [4].
Our privacy policy [5] states "The Wikimedia Foundation may keep raw
logs of such transactions [IP and other technical information], but
these will not be published or used to track legitimate users." and
"As a general principle, the access to, and retention of, personally
identifiable data in all projects should be minimal and should be used
only internally to serve the well-being of the projects."
I think we should stop the current use of Google Analytics ASAP.
Bye, Tim.
--
http://wikimedia.de
[1]
http://knowprivacy.org
[2]
http://www.heise.de/newsticker/Studie-Google-fuehrend-bei-Web-Bug-Nutzung--…
[3]
http://www.knowprivacy.org/report/KnowPrivacy_Final_Report.pdf, p. 4
[4]
http://vls.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Common.js
[5]
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Privacy_policy