This is a bad idea. I share Mathias' concerns that this has privacy
policy implications.
-Dan Rosenthal
On Oct 2, 2007, at 12:27 PM, Andrew Whitworth wrote:
Many people are probably aware now that i've started a test of the
Google Analytics page counter on en.wikibooks. I hear that people
are running a similar kind of test on en.wikinews. Currently, these
programs are opt-in: only registered users are using these scripts,
and it involves manually adding them to the personal monobook
files. The information received so far has been fantastic: counts
of page hits, click patterns, information about entry points that
we can use to improve the welcome for new visitions, etc. However
this test has also raised a few concerns. Some concerns I would
like to address, others I would like to get input from the
foundation about.
1) First and foremost is the issue of privacy. The information that
google analytics collects is a step above what is typically
available to regular users, but not quite as detailed as CU data.
Some information, such as geographical area and the ISP of a user
is aggregated, but it is not attached in any way to a user's
screenname. That is, without a priori knowledge about the user, it
is impossible to attach a particular username to a particular ISP,
geographical location, or any other piece of collected data. I am
currently inspecting the google analytics code looking for a way to
suppress the collection of ISP or geographical information, but
havent found a way yet.
1a) Ancillary to the idea of privacy is the issue that the
analytics code should probably remain opt-in. Many users are
conscious of privacy and security issues, and they shouldnt be
forced to decide between participating in a tracking program or not
visiting wikibooks at all. I've proposed a solution that
unregistered users could be tracked by default (testing wgUserName
== null), but registered users would need to opt-in explicitly.
After all, I feel that information about our readers is far more
important then the same information about our editors.
1b) Another related idea is that individual books could be tracked
for readership patterns, while the whole remainder of the wikibooks
project could remain script-free. Notification templates could be
used to indicate which books the scripts were active on. A book
could be tracked for a month or so at a time. We could track a
handful of books at once, and then change which books we track on a
regular basis.
2) Second is the issue of server load. Running the script now
currently involves an additional javascript page access per user.
However, the javascript files can be cached. The script runs in
javascript and performs interactions with the google analytics
website, but does not transact with the WMF servers. I believe that
server load for us should be minimal (but I want confirmation about
this from the techs)
3) Log files are only available by default to the google account
holder (myself) and other people that are specifically added by
myself to the profile. If we keep the access list very restrictive,
we dont need to worry about sensitive data from becoming public.
However, we do run the risk of giving users with access "power",
which is a common fear. If we were to set up accounts on behalf of
the project or the WMF (as opposed to personal accounts), we could
negate this issue entirely.
I'm looking for as much input on this issue as I can get. I'm not
planning to make any changes to any javascript for the forseeable
future, till the concerns are ironed out.
--Andrew Whitworth
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