Mailing List Archive: Positive mention of Wikimedia sites in a web privacy study:

Positive mention of Wikimedia sites in a web privacy study:

Aug 11, 2009, 2:13 PM

Post #1 of 5 (793 views)

This paper is making the rounds:

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1446862

"This is a pilot study of the use of â€œFlash cookiesâ€ by popular
websites. We find that more than 50% of the sites in our sample are
using flash cookies to store information about the user. Some are
using it to "respawn" or re-instantiate HTTP cookies deleted by the
user. Flash cookies often share the same values as HTTP cookies, and
are even used on government websites to assign unique values to users.
Privacy policies rarely disclose the presence of Flash cookies, and
user controls for effectuating privacy preferences are lacking. "

Inside it says:

"We encountered Flash cookies on 54 of the top 100 sites. [â€¦]
Ninety-eight of the top 100 sites set HTTP cookies (only wikipedia and
wikimedia.org lacked HTTP cookies in our tests). These 98 sites set a
total of 3,602 HTTP cookies."

Kudos to the WMF for avoiding gratuitous reader tracking. Other
people *are* paying attention to the privacy implications of this kind
of user-invisible behavior.

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Re: Positive mention of Wikimedia sites in a web privacy study: [ In reply to ]

brion at wikimedia

Aug 11, 2009, 3:03 PM

Post #2 of 5 (773 views)

Permalink

On 8/11/09 2:13 PM, Gregory Maxwell wrote:
> Kudos to the WMF for avoiding gratuitous reader tracking. Other
> people *are* paying attention to the privacy implications of this kind
> of user-invisible behavior.

Yay!

Quick note: the only sort of user tracking that we would be interested
in doing is to get aggregate information about activity habits.

We wouldn't want to record which pages a given visitor sees, but it
could be very useful to know that X% of visitors click on N pages per
session, or that Y% of folks tend to give up if a page takes more than Z
seconds to load. As long as we can do this without creepy big-brother
databases of Everything You Do, this shouldn't infringe on anybody's
privacy.

Of course the default assumption with any sort of long-term tracking
cookie is going to be that Evil Is Afoot(TM), so we'd want to keep
things looking squeaky clean as well: if we use tracking cookies for
statistical purpose they're more likely to be per-session cookies, not
permanent ones, and we would never use sneaky techniques to hide them
from users.

-- brion

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Re: Positive mention of Wikimedia sites in a web privacy study: [ In reply to ]

meta.sj at gmail

Aug 12, 2009, 3:07 AM

Post #3 of 5 (751 views)

Permalink

Feature Request Aside : I would appreciate having a preference to turn
on aggressive use tracking for myself -- to provide me with personal
statistics about my own site usage. Currently there's nothing other
than a watchlist (or hand-created/edited page) and some toolserver
tools that track edits over time that offer any sort of history; no
beadcrumbs or more advanced reading history is available.

SJ

On Tue, Aug 11, 2009 at 6:03 PM, Brion Vibber<brion@wikimedia.org> wrote:
> On 8/11/09 2:13 PM, Gregory Maxwell wrote:
>> Kudos to the WMF for avoiding gratuitous reader tracking. Other
>> people *are* paying attention to the privacy implications of this kind
>> of user-invisible behavior.
>
> Yay!
>
> Quick note: the only sort of user tracking that we would be interested
> in doing is to get aggregate information about activity habits.
>
> We wouldn't want to record which pages a given visitor sees, but it
> could be very useful to know that X% of visitors click on N pages per
> session, or that Y% of folks tend to give up if a page takes more than Z
> seconds to load. As long as we can do this without creepy big-brother
> databases of Everything You Do, this shouldn't infringe on anybody's
> privacy.
>
> Of course the default assumption with any sort of long-term tracking
> cookie is going to be that Evil Is Afoot(TM), so we'd want to keep
> things looking squeaky clean as well: if we use tracking cookies for
> statistical purpose they're more likely to be per-session cookies, not
> permanent ones, and we would never use sneaky techniques to hide them
> from users.
>
> -- brion
>
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>

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Re: Positive mention of Wikimedia sites in a web privacy study: [ In reply to ]

dcduring at gmail

Aug 12, 2009, 4:33 AM

Post #4 of 5 (743 views)

Permalink

I would so much like it if we had aggregate statistics about our users and
their behavior while retaining our exemplary privacy culture.

At Wiktionary it seems to me that the absence of statistics about users,
especially anons, seems to lead us to a culture of serving ourselves rather
than users, not in the largest matters, but in countless small matters of
entry layout, subsidiary entries, help etc. This is not to evil motives. It
is mostly due to the active editors defaulting to using themselves as models
of the typical user. The ability of experienced users to customize makes
the practice quite ridiculous. Our efforts to solicit feedback give us a
view of users the bias of which is uncalibrated.

On Tue, Aug 11, 2009 at 6:03 PM, Brion Vibber <brion@wikimedia.org> wrote:

> On 8/11/09 2:13 PM, Gregory Maxwell wrote:
> > Kudos to the WMF for avoiding gratuitous reader tracking. Other
> > people *are* paying attention to the privacy implications of this kind
> > of user-invisible behavior.
>
> Yay!
>
> Quick note: the only sort of user tracking that we would be interested
> in doing is to get aggregate information about activity habits.
>
> We wouldn't want to record which pages a given visitor sees, but it
> could be very useful to know that X% of visitors click on N pages per
> session, or that Y% of folks tend to give up if a page takes more than Z
> seconds to load. As long as we can do this without creepy big-brother
> databases of Everything You Do, this shouldn't infringe on anybody's
> privacy.
>
> Of course the default assumption with any sort of long-term tracking
> cookie is going to be that Evil Is Afoot(TM), so we'd want to keep
> things looking squeaky clean as well: if we use tracking cookies for
> statistical purpose they're more likely to be per-session cookies, not
> permanent ones, and we would never use sneaky techniques to hide them
> from users.
>
> -- brion
>
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>

--
Dennis C. During

Cynolatry is tolerant so long as the dog is not denied an equal divinity
with the deities of other faiths. - Ambrose Bierce

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cynolatry
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Re: Positive mention of Wikimedia sites in a web privacy study: [ In reply to ]

james at jdforrester

Aug 12, 2009, 5:00 AM

Post #5 of 5 (746 views)

Permalink

2009/8/12 Samuel Klein <meta.sj@gmail.com>:
> Feature Request Aside : I would appreciate having a preference to turn
> on aggressive use tracking for myself -- to provide me with personal
> statistics about my own site usage. Currently there's nothing other
> than a watchlist (or hand-created/edited page) and some toolserver
> tools that track edits over time that offer any sort of history; no
> beadcrumbs or more advanced reading history is available.

The UserStats extension[0] does some pretty graphs, but I'm not sure
I've seen such a detailed and advanced tool. Would be interesting, if
intrusive, to see my results. :-)

[0] - http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Usage_Statistics

J.
--
James D. Forrester
jdforrester@wikimedia.org | jdforrester@gmail.com
[[Wikipedia:User:Jdforrester|James F.]]

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