[Web4lib] Fwd: [web4lib] survey on library website third party analytics privacy concerns

[Brian Tingle]

On Wed, Aug 25, 2010 at 1:09 AM, David Kane <dkane at wit.ie> wrote:
> Libraries knowing your IP address is one thing.  I don't think that
> this is a serious issue because no librarian I know is going to pore
> over reams of IP addresses to try and connect particular real
> individuals to possible book crimes.

The fear here is not so much that we librarian-types will be looking
over the logs, but that we will get a national security letter and the
FBI will want to come in to look at the logs.  So we have this
convoluted system to hash out the IP addresses with random salts that
works on logs that are about to turn 30 days old.


> However, Google analytics works in such a way as to make it possible
> for individual users to be tracked across all sites that use Google
> analytics.  If those users also have Google accounts, as many do, then
> suddenly Google is going to know a lot about you, as an individual.
> Using something else would remove any significant privacy concerns
> that I might have about this.  One such program might  be AWstats,
> which analyses the server log files.

The reports from AWstats pale in comparison to google analytics.
Urchin can use cookie rather than IP/hostnames; piwiki looks
interesting, but google analytics is the best of breed and somebody
else runs it for you for free for up to some very large traffic cap.

My opinion is that as long as we
a) make it clear in the privacy statement on the site that we are
using google analytics plus whatever else we are doing
b) turn on this anonymizeIp privacy option in the javascript that
calls the tracking API ==>
http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/gaJS/gaJSApi_gat.html#_gat._anonymizeIp
c) let users know they can elect to opt out of the behavioral tracking
d) turn off IP logging on our own web servers
then I think we are making a good faith effort to maintain the high
standards libraries have to protect patron privacy in the information
environment we find ourselves in.