Improving metrics gathering

Paul W. Frields stickster at gmail.com
Thu Feb 4 23:49:44 UTC 2010


On Thu, Feb 04, 2010 at 03:03:21PM -0800, Luis Villa wrote:
> 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' :)

Great point, Luis.  Matt and I took as an action item getting with our
legal counsel, and I think it would be wonderful to approach that as a
collaboration the way you suggest here.

-- 
Paul W. Frields                                http://paul.frields.org/
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