Am 08/12/2011 10:42 PM, schrieb Rob Weir:
On Fri, Aug 12, 2011 at 4:14 PM, Eike Rathke<[email protected]> wrote:
Hi Rob,
On Friday, 2011-08-12 13:29:00 -0400, Rob Weir wrote:
Before taking that step, it's worth asking if the project actually
has a need for web analytics yet. They were included on OO.o site
mainly because Sun was using the data as part of its business
metrics. It's not obvious that the same need exists in AOOo.
I think it is an essential tool to optimizing the web experience for
our visitors. It is part of a feedback loop where we look at the
traffic stats, how our website is actually being used, the
demographics of the visitors, etc., and then iteratively improve the
website to make it more useful.
So first question is: analytics yes or no, which affects also the
Privacy Policy.
On the question of Piwik (open source, used, for example by
LibreOffice) versus Google Analytics, I'm very familiar with Google,
so I could help more there. But I don't have an informed opinion on
the virtues of each. I've never heard of Piwik until today.
The big difference is that with Piwik the data collected stays inhouse
at Apache, whereas with Google it goes to Google that does whatever you
don't know. This again implies that at Apache measures must be taken to
protect the privacy of collected data. The German "Landeszentrum für
Datenschutz Schleswig-Holstein" (center of data protection) has a few
documents about tracking [1], unfortunately only in German, why Google
Analytics doesn't comply with the German data protection law [2] and how
Piwik can be configured to be used in compliance with the law [3].
Does this law matter if the servers are hosted in the US, not in
Germany? (I'm assuming that the Apache servers are in the US).
No, but it not a secret that the protection of private data is, hm, not
the best in the US compared with other. So, why stick with this?
Storing the data ourselves is a double-edged sword. If we store it,
then we are responsible for any problems with that data.
I don't think that would be more difficult than what Apache is storing
anyway (mail addresses, user names, passwords). I don't think that we
would be interested in IP addresses, postal addresses, etc.
The main part would be to know the user's browser data (OS, language,
browser app and version). For me no special data that should get special
treated.
Google states what they can do with the data, but it is rather broad,
as you know.
When you are really concerned about protection of private data, then you
wouldn't use Google Analytics. ;-)
[1] https://www.datenschutzzentrum.de/tracking/
[2] https://www.datenschutzzentrum.de/tracking/20090123_GA_stellungnahme.pdf
[3] https://www.datenschutzzentrum.de/tracking/piwik/
Eike
Marcus
