WTF?

[opcoded]

Thanks to kuangning for posting this.

Livejournal announces stat gathering changes

I'm curious as to other people's opinions on this. On the surface, at least to me, it looks somewhat harmless. However, there's not much known about the service they're using to gather these statistics, so I'm a bit apprehensive.

There is an opt-out option, thankfully. Just go to the Admin Console and type "set opt_exclude_stats 1"

I'm just wondering other people's thoughts on this. I realize a lot of people will likely opt out of the data gathering, but I'm curious as to what the overall concensus is (to kind of foster some sort of discussion, at least. I need brain fuel!).

Comments

[etherpunk.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that's pretty much what I was figuring, but I've already seen (as per usual) some minor panic from people going 'OMG PRIVACY INVASION' when they haven't necessarily done any looking into what data is being gathered.

Not specifically anyone I know, but some people on that thread don't see it as quite as innocuous.

[ryan-speck.livejournal.com]

I would say that they are the tinfoil hats.

People are just looking for a reason to panic now that LJ is the corporate bad guy.

[etherpunk.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that's a lot of the thing I'm seeing. They're looking at it from completely the wrong direction.

I can understand some of the changes making sense from SixApart's POV. I'm not sure what the end-user effect of those changes are, but I know a lot of people are very unhappy. The signal to noise ratio is completely off the charts.

[ryan-speck.livejournal.com]

Yeah. In this case, it's just an announcement of collecting usage data on browser usage, what type of pages people look at the most, etc., to feed to advertisers to help better shape ad traffic. They're not collecting data on people; they're just getting demographics to help put ads in better places and which browsers and page sizes to point them at.

[etherpunk.livejournal.com]

Exactly. Happens all the time.

[shippo.livejournal.com]

A lot of the comments with privacy concerns are pretty out there. LJ's already been able to collect this kind of usage data since, like, forever via their HTTP access logs. They're probably contracting their analytics through a third party since it's more feasible to buy something off-the-shelf than it is to build their own system to crunch access data.

6A will probably end up using clickstream data for one (or both) of two things:
1.) To see how well changes in the site perform, and how changes affect the way that people use the site.
2.) To deliver better targeted advertising to users. If they're able to have an idea where a user's interests lie, they're capable of delivering ads that a user may actually be interested in. I'm not really sure whether 6A is intending for LJ to have more of an advertising-supported model, but analytics would play a useful role in that.

[etherpunk.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that's where the discussion on this issue has been heading. I'm not worried about it. The fact they give you an opt-out option is a nice deal, but if it's just anonymous data, opting out would sort of skew the results a bit, right?

[shippo.livejournal.com]

Yeah, opting out would skew the data a bit, but it's probably not enough to be statistically relevant.