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On 12/9/12 6:50 PM, Glen Barber wrote:
<blockquote cite="mid:20121210025058.GG37809@glenbarber.us"
type="cite">
<pre wrap="">On Sun, Dec 09, 2012 at 09:40:41PM -0500, George Rosamond wrote:
</pre>
<blockquote type="cite">
<pre wrap="">The same day of my little rant at the last meeting, here's some very
timely news:
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-announce/2012-December/001441.html">http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-announce/2012-December/001441.html</a>
Now certainly you can get a lot out of their analytics. Information
that can be useful in the interests of users, and spawn improvements in
web sites, like FreeBSD.org.
But as I argued, nothing is free. And when anyone claims anonymity by
policy, you are trusting their word that it's true, trusting their
lawyers that they can defend the data, etc.
While not as disturbing as the Amazon/Canonical/Ubuntu spyware, it is
certainly an ugly turn, IMHO.
</pre>
</blockquote>
<pre wrap="">
Google Analytics was chosen for administrative reasons.
We are honoring the DNT header _before_ the Google Javascript is
fetched. Additionally, we are anonymizing the accessing IPs.
</pre>
</blockquote>
feel free to ignore this rant...<br>
<br>
<rant><br>
Glen - thank you for point that out! I've been following the thread
regarding this on chat@ and it's been driving me up the wall. I
feel like there has been a lot of FUD surrounding this announcement,
along with a side order of "there are all these great open-source
analytic engines they could use" w/o providing on concrete example
of what they are, or how to implement them, or even an offer to
provide such a platform to the freebsd project.<br>
<br>
is google doing super sketchy things that is frankly taking the
internet in a direction that a majority of technologists find
apprehensible - yes! and even worse i work in the same industry to
feed my family! the current state of using the WWW as a platform to
monetize on personal browsing behaviour is certainly not what I
wanted the web to turn into back in the early/mid '90's, and I
certainly think we are all partly responsible for letting things get
to this point. it sucks, but we can't put Pandora back in her box
at this point unfortunately.<br>
<br>
but...having said that - I think we need to take a deep breath
here. i really don't think an .org like FreeBSD has the financial
or human resources to implement an OSS version of GoogleAnalytics
(which seems to be a frequent cry on chat@, i.e. "freebsd should do
this themselves"). I think the announcement is pretty clear on the
benefits that GA has over a homegrown or home-managed
implementations. my reading of the announcement is that this is an
effort to ensure that <a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="http://www.freebsd.org">www.freebsd.org</a> (and specifically its already
excellent documentation) is relevant for end users. by using a tool
like GA, the volunteers are able to ensure their limited resources
are spent in an intelligent manner improving documentation as well
as the website with a relatively minor investment in gathering data
on usage patterns.<br>
<br>
i can't speak for the internals of GA personally, but the general
proposition is that google has always leveraged the economy of scale
to their advantage. in the case of GA is it not only the crazy
amount of computational power they own - but the amount of data that
they are able to mine to generate interesting insights into browsing
behavior. it is not clear to me if people are either offended that:<br>
<br>
a) google performs data-mining *really* well<br>
or<br>
b) the fruit of this mining will be used to improve the
documentation that is produced by freebsd<br>
<br>
The FUD surrounding the fact that freebsd.org is going to mine your
personal data regardless of your personal preferences seems to be
off base as per this snippet from post to a thread on chat@ that
shows what the .js will look like that enables this functionality:<br>
<br>
<meta charset="utf-8">
<pre style="white-space: pre-wrap; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px;">if (window.navigator.doNotTrack !== "yes") {
( function() {
var ga = document.createElement('script');
ga.type = 'text/javascript';
ga.async = true;
ga.src = '<a href="https://ssl.google-analytics.com/ga.js">https://ssl.google-analytics.com/ga.js</a>';
var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0];
s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s);
})();
}
</pre>
so this looks pretty good - if you set your browser to announce you
don't want to be tracked, then don't track me. perhaps FreeBSD.org
should post an announcement for first time users letting them know
about the use of GA, and offer advice as to how to enable
doNotTrack. <br>
<br>
my argument can be boiled down to like so: <br>
let's use this as an opportunity to educate users about behaviour
tracking, and allow people to make decisions on their own as
rational agents. this shit ain't going away, so lets shine some
light on it and expose both the positives and negatives, and
hopefully we'll create some better educated users in the process.<br>
</rant><br>
<br>
-pete<br>
<br>
<br>
<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
Pete Wright
<a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:pete@nomadlogic.org">pete@nomadlogic.org</a>
<a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="http://www.nomadlogic.org">www.nomadlogic.org</a></pre>
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