[Foundation-l] Positive mention of Wikimedia sites in a web privacy study:

[Brion Vibber]

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