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

[Samuel Klein]

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 Vibber<brion at 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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