This paper is making the rounds:
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1446862
"This is a pilot study of the use of “Flash cookies” by popular websites. We find that more than 50% of the sites in our sample are using flash cookies to store information about the user. Some are using it to "respawn" or re-instantiate HTTP cookies deleted by the user. Flash cookies often share the same values as HTTP cookies, and are even used on government websites to assign unique values to users. Privacy policies rarely disclose the presence of Flash cookies, and user controls for effectuating privacy preferences are lacking. "
Inside it says:
"We encountered Flash cookies on 54 of the top 100 sites. […] Ninety-eight of the top 100 sites set HTTP cookies (only wikipedia and wikimedia.org lacked HTTP cookies in our tests). These 98 sites set a total of 3,602 HTTP cookies."
Kudos to the WMF for avoiding gratuitous reader tracking. Other people *are* paying attention to the privacy implications of this kind of user-invisible behavior.
On 8/11/09 2:13 PM, Gregory Maxwell wrote:
Kudos to the WMF for avoiding gratuitous reader tracking. Other people *are* paying attention to the privacy implications of this kind of user-invisible behavior.
Yay!
Quick note: the only sort of user tracking that we would be interested in doing is to get aggregate information about activity habits.
We wouldn't want to record which pages a given visitor sees, but it could be very useful to know that X% of visitors click on N pages per session, or that Y% of folks tend to give up if a page takes more than Z seconds to load. As long as we can do this without creepy big-brother databases of Everything You Do, this shouldn't infringe on anybody's privacy.
Of course the default assumption with any sort of long-term tracking cookie is going to be that Evil Is Afoot(TM), so we'd want to keep things looking squeaky clean as well: if we use tracking cookies for statistical purpose they're more likely to be per-session cookies, not permanent ones, and we would never use sneaky techniques to hide them from users.
-- brion
Feature Request Aside : I would appreciate having a preference to turn on aggressive use tracking for myself -- to provide me with personal statistics about my own site usage. Currently there's nothing other than a watchlist (or hand-created/edited page) and some toolserver tools that track edits over time that offer any sort of history; no beadcrumbs or more advanced reading history is available.
SJ
On Tue, Aug 11, 2009 at 6:03 PM, Brion Vibberbrion@wikimedia.org wrote:
On 8/11/09 2:13 PM, Gregory Maxwell wrote:
Kudos to the WMF for avoiding gratuitous reader tracking. Other people *are* paying attention to the privacy implications of this kind of user-invisible behavior.
Yay!
Quick note: the only sort of user tracking that we would be interested in doing is to get aggregate information about activity habits.
We wouldn't want to record which pages a given visitor sees, but it could be very useful to know that X% of visitors click on N pages per session, or that Y% of folks tend to give up if a page takes more than Z seconds to load. As long as we can do this without creepy big-brother databases of Everything You Do, this shouldn't infringe on anybody's privacy.
Of course the default assumption with any sort of long-term tracking cookie is going to be that Evil Is Afoot(TM), so we'd want to keep things looking squeaky clean as well: if we use tracking cookies for statistical purpose they're more likely to be per-session cookies, not permanent ones, and we would never use sneaky techniques to hide them from users.
-- brion
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2009/8/12 Samuel Klein meta.sj@gmail.com:
Feature Request Aside : I would appreciate having a preference to turn on aggressive use tracking for myself -- to provide me with personal statistics about my own site usage. Currently there's nothing other than a watchlist (or hand-created/edited page) and some toolserver tools that track edits over time that offer any sort of history; no beadcrumbs or more advanced reading history is available.
The UserStats extension[0] does some pretty graphs, but I'm not sure I've seen such a detailed and advanced tool. Would be interesting, if intrusive, to see my results. :-)
[0] - http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Usage_Statistics
J.
I would so much like it if we had aggregate statistics about our users and their behavior while retaining our exemplary privacy culture.
At Wiktionary it seems to me that the absence of statistics about users, especially anons, seems to lead us to a culture of serving ourselves rather than users, not in the largest matters, but in countless small matters of entry layout, subsidiary entries, help etc. This is not to evil motives. It is mostly due to the active editors defaulting to using themselves as models of the typical user. The ability of experienced users to customize makes the practice quite ridiculous. Our efforts to solicit feedback give us a view of users the bias of which is uncalibrated.
On Tue, Aug 11, 2009 at 6:03 PM, Brion Vibber brion@wikimedia.org wrote:
On 8/11/09 2:13 PM, Gregory Maxwell wrote:
Kudos to the WMF for avoiding gratuitous reader tracking. Other people *are* paying attention to the privacy implications of this kind of user-invisible behavior.
Yay!
Quick note: the only sort of user tracking that we would be interested in doing is to get aggregate information about activity habits.
We wouldn't want to record which pages a given visitor sees, but it could be very useful to know that X% of visitors click on N pages per session, or that Y% of folks tend to give up if a page takes more than Z seconds to load. As long as we can do this without creepy big-brother databases of Everything You Do, this shouldn't infringe on anybody's privacy.
Of course the default assumption with any sort of long-term tracking cookie is going to be that Evil Is Afoot(TM), so we'd want to keep things looking squeaky clean as well: if we use tracking cookies for statistical purpose they're more likely to be per-session cookies, not permanent ones, and we would never use sneaky techniques to hide them from users.
-- brion
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