On Thursday 6. July 2017 19.11.13 Thomas Doczkal wrote: > Thanks for your mail Erik. I fully support what you say. This makes all > sense to me. > > Well one thing is with online activities you can even track down the effect > to single users if you like to. Personalized links is the hint here. We > fortunately don't have it but Facebook and Xing or Twitter do, to name > just a few.
I think we have to be careful. Metrics gathering can quickly become something similar to surveillance, and then you need to be careful in justifying what kind of information you are gathering and how people's activities are being monitored. It is even more sensitive if you are an organisation that is opposed to pervasive surveillance, as I indeed noted a few years ago when the UK Pirate Party had Google Analytics integrated into their Web presence while being conspicuously opposed to exactly that kind of thing in their rhetoric. I remember in the previous iteration of the Fellowship Wiki, there was an apparent need to introduce Piwik support, which was an alternative to using Google Analytics like many sites do. But I felt rather uneasy about this. Not only did it tend to slow down the page loading (as Google Analytics and the now-commonplace parade of scripts tend to do), but it wasn't clear why we needed to track people around FSFE "assets". Were we actually learning anything or was this just another neat piece of technology to deploy? Since the original request for feedback, I became even more aware that the FSF's Defective By Design campaigners use non-free social networks as a tool to spread their message. Then again, I find the style of that campaign to be rather counterproductive in certain regards, so perhaps it shouldn't be taken as an example of what to do, necessarily. Paul _______________________________________________ Discussion mailing list Discussion@lists.fsfe.org https://lists.fsfe.org/mailman/listinfo/discussion