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Hi kids! Today the cute and cuddly Mr. Penguin from AOL will answer all your questions on behavioral targeting! Isn’t he cute! Now you know that behavioral targeting is your friend!
Have a good day! And a tip o’the cap to the Good People at AOL who keep Mr. Penguin in anchovies in return […]

Another Emetrics has come and gone. Many of the Summit’s highlights have been presented in other blogs, but I did want to point out a few personal observations:
Big News and Rumors: Eric Peterson strikes out on his own, a new Google Analytics, and WebSideStory changes its name to Visual Sciences. But the biggest […]

USA Today is running a couple of opinion pieces, one (apparently staff-written) questioning how well the US government is doing with information security, and calling for more accountability. The report card recently issued by Rep. Tom Davis, R-Va., of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, doesn’t look so good. The opinion piece […]

Lars Johansson, the Swedish coordinator for the WAA, has a web site and blog. One interesting thing he does is ask questions of different people who are involved in the Web Analytics field, and publish the conversation on the site.
Today, Lars posted a batch of new interviews, including Phil Kemelor regarding industry differences across […]

Two years ago, sitting in the airplane after attending Emetrics 05 Santa Barbara (and having to leave early), I penned a letter to organizer Jim Sterne, asking him if he’d bring up some issues around web data privacy at the first Web Analytics Association general meeting. Turns out he didn’t get my email until […]

Somebody asked me for my reaction to the announcement that Google has decided to make Urchin free. I already said it once:
A nice way to get even more off-network data is to supply folks with a hosted analytics service that most small and medium-sized web sites can use. Simply put a web bug / beacon […]

Eric offers the advice
Don’t expect something for nothing.
What are surfers willing to do to get personalized content?
In May, ChoiceStream did an email survey of 923 U.S. online adults, and found that consumers want personalized content, but they are wary of using methods like click tracking to inform the personalization. Not only that, but they […]

I was recently told
I looked at your ‘about’ page. it’s more about what you do than who you are.
Fair enough, and a good observation. But how does one define who one is? I’m thinking specifically about web analytics and user tracking. We want to provide compelling content (or products, services, etc) that engage users. The […]

…get new ones!
Compliance Pipeline reports on a new Forrester survey:
A whopping 63% of large companies employ or plan to hire people to read or audit sent e-mail — that figure is 70% among the largest companies.
This is just offensive. Check out The GNU Privacy Guard.

According to Gartner’s June 23 press release discussing their phishing report:
Approximately 77 percent of online Americans shopped online in the 12 months ended in May 2005, according to Gartner. An estimated 73 percent of respondents regularly logged on to banking accounts and 63 percent paid bills online.
Amazing stats, eh? Much higher than I’d have thought. […]

I haven’t seen it discussed anywhere, but Jupiter did a follow-up survey to their report on cookie deletion. The goal was to give some context around the profile of the cookie deleter. While the summary from the report is that the longer you’ve been on-line, the more likely you are to delete cookies, […]

Forrester released the results of a survey in an report called What’s On Web Analytics Users’ Minds? The report mirrors a lot of the issues we see here at Yahoo! (instrumentation concerns, multiple sources of “truth”, no silver bullet for counting users) but there’s one sentence that jumped out at me - this was regarding […]

Last week I got a letter from a health clinic that I used maybe five years ago. The letter said some of their PCs were stolen out of their office, and on those PCs were the electronic records of their patients, including mine. They also sent a photocopy of the police report, for reasons […]

So a court has ordered Y! to turn over all materials belonging to a marine killed in Iraq after his family sued to get access. Y! News has the AP story.
To its credit (in my opinion), in order to comply wirh the court ruling, Y! turned over a CD of information (and will produce paper […]

It’s not news in the security community, but demonstrating that WEP is so insecure that even the FBI can break it: TomsNetworking discusses a demonstration where the Feds broke a 128 bit WEP key in about three minutes.
WPA is much better, but still a target.
The solution? VPN, of course. And since your wireless […]