What is that smell?
That would be the smell of a stale blog. Two things have kept me from writing: summer and being insanely busy. Summer in Minnesota is not to be wasted behind a keyboard! I’m still insanely busy, but summer is on the wane. So, it’s time to get back at it!
TrackMeNot came to my attention the other day. It is a plugin for Firefox that sends a random search query to the major search engines every few seconds (default is every 12 seconds). It was inspired by the release of the AOL search data. If you haven’t heard about that you can search the data here. Pretty cool, but scary eh? I wouldn’t want my search records collected like that, even if my name wasn’t directly attached. TrackMeNot is meant to game this system by producing so much noise that the signal is lost. The tool is pretty simple, it looks like it took about 10 minutes to program.
TrackMeNot has no direct impact on Web Analytics (unless you work for a big search engine), but it should serve as a warning: Be careful with your data! Think about how it would look in public and be very careful about collecting and processing anything that would compromise your visitor’s privacy. The scary thing about the AOL data is that many people were easily identifiable even without their names attached. It would take another 5 minutes of programming for the creators of this program to do the same thing to most web analytics data. I don’t think there is a big demand for something like this right now, but If there are a few high profile unintentional data releases that would change pretty quickly. And that would make all of this much more difficult.
Recent Comments