Improving metrics gathering

Luis Villa luis.villa at gmail.com
Thu Feb 4 23:03:21 UTC 2010


On Thu, Feb 4, 2010 at 8:16 AM, Matt Domsch <matt at domsch.com> wrote:
> Personally, I don't think this is a big problem.  Maybe it is.  If it
> were, the entire industry which uses cookies exactly for such tracking
> (and even more so) would have huge security, privacy, and other
> lawsuit concerns which I just don't hear about.  Whatever we do will
> have to run past Legal.

I'm not giving legal, or even moral, advice here, but aiming to be as
ethical as the internet advertising industry is a really, really low
bar. :)

I actually think collecting good usage data is really, really
important, and open source projects and their legal counsels would be
well-served to collaborate on defining best practices for this area.
And I think if we sat down and thought it through, we could come up
with best practices that would simultaneously let us gather a lot more
data than we currently gather, and do as good (or possibly even
better) by our users.

So I'm not trying to discourage you; I think this is great. I'm just
saying you don't do yourself any favors by saying 'well, the ad
industry gets away with it, so it is OK for us' :)

Luis


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