Marketing team, I'd like to discuss the privacy of data the project collects, so we know what can be shared on the lists, and with interested third-parties.
I'd like to cover these types of data: 1) Download stats 2) Web analytics for the website and the blog 3) Size of the mailing lists 4) Composition of the mailing lists Here's what that data can be used for: (1) and (2) can be used to measure popularity of CouchDB and how our marketing efforts and releases have an impact on the project. (3) can be used to get a sense of how big the community is, and how that is changing over time. (4) can be used to get demographic information. There are plenty of tools that will mine information from a list of email addresses, linking people up with employers, LinkedIn profiles, and other social media. Now, as far as I am concerned: (1) is fine and I am happy sharing that on this list. (2) should be for committers by default only, but relevant info can be posted if it helps us in our marketing efforts. Popular page views, specific page views, paths/clicktrails, browser demographics, and so on. But what about information like location, age, gender, interests and so on (which you can get from some analytics tools). I think we'd have to make sure that whatever was being shared publicly was 1) actually useful to us and needed to be shared, and 2) heavily aggregated so as not to cause any privacy concerns. (I am more interested in doing the right thing here than I am getting around the legalities of the situation.) (3) is fine, and we share this every three months already in our board reports. (4) seems like something that ought to be confidential and not shared with anyone outside of the PMC for any purpose. If we shared (4) with anyone, we'd have to share it with everyone, per our strict vendor neutral position. And there is already a strong consensus on the internal ASF press@ list that this is out of the question. What do other people think? Thank you, -- Noah Slater https://twitter.com/nslater
