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

[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.