I am so ashamed. I was once a system & network manager, so I know about things like bad passwords and scanning software. Later, I built firewalls for Sun. Lately I’ve lectured on the importance of locking down your web analytics data, and the precautions you need to take. So imagine my shock to discover [...]
Entries Tagged as 'Privacy'
The Behavioral Targeting Penguin
March 10th, 2008 No Comments
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 for [...]
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Notes on Emetrics Summit San Francisco 2007
May 15th, 2007 7 Comments
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 question [...]
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Protecting Citizens’ Private Data
May 10th, 2007 No Comments
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 concludes that [...]
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Lars Johannson: Some Good Interviews
May 3rd, 2007 No Comments
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 [...]
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Web Analytics Ethics
April 26th, 2007 No Comments
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 after [...]
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Google Analytics
November 14th, 2005 1 Comment
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 / [...]
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Getting something for nothing
September 11th, 2005 1 Comment
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, [...]
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Who Are You?
July 22nd, 2005 No Comments
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 [...]
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If You Can’t Trust Your Employees…
July 7th, 2005 No Comments
…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.
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