[pydotorg-www] Analytics

[Georg Brandl]

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Am 25.04.2010 22:25, schrieb Michael Foord:
>>>> At work I went to a recent talk on Google Analytics, which provides an
>>>> impressive number of analyses to track where people are coming from,
>>>> what queries they're using, how long they stay on average, etc.  But
>>>> visitors are only recorded if their browser supports JavaScript, and
>>>> dumping that information into Google raises privacy concerns.
>>>>        
>>> -1 on Google Analytics, for the privacy reasons. I don't believe you
>>> need JavaScript in the browser for it to do tracking, but with
>>> JavaScript, even more information gets collected.
>>>
>>> Here in Germany, it is the law that users have to opt in to have
>>> personal data being collected, and IP addresses are considered personal
>>> information. So strictly speaking, even a plain webserver log without
>>> user consent is against the law (the one exception being operational
>>> necessity). This isn't really being followed in practice, but we should
>>> not give personal data to anybody else (aggregated data is fine).
>>>      
>> I also don't really see the need to put something in every python.org page
>> when the webserver collects enough data just fine.
>>
> The extra information that google analytics (or a similar service) gives 
> you is the ability to track how visitors use the site (what path they 
> take - which pages they tend to exit the site on, and so on). If we 
> really wanted to track how "user friendly" certain parts of our site are 
> then it could be extremely useful, and not information we could *easily* 
> get from the server logs alone.

Why?  Assuming not too much IP duplication, this should be easy to extract
through the HTTP referer, or even through tracking requests of a single IP.
Or am I missing something?

> I doubt we have anyone wanting to use this information though.

Exactly.

Georg
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