Trust them as much as you like

[pecunium]

6A announced, back in January, that they meant to implement some analytics.

They claim it's benign, me; given the recent flaps, I don't really care to have people poking about in my affairs.

This is the announcement in Lj Biz.

With this new change, we'll now also use Omniture on a very small random sampling (about 5%) of journals and communities, including profile pages, friends pages and comment pages. This change will take place on or after September 27, 2007.

Omniture is a website analytics service. The system will collect information that's pretty straightforward, including what browser you're using, what site scheme you use, your window size, how people travel through the site (what are the common links, where are people going after viewing their friends page, what people are or aren't clicking on), and things like how many page views different parts of the site get.

With this change we will be able to learn more about how you use the site and what areas are confusing or are in need of improvement. We'll also have a good way to help prioritize all of your suggestions based on what people actually use.

Some key points:

* We're only going to apply the cookie to a very small random sampling of users, about 5%.
* We're using the resulting stats to find out what to focus on in the future for LJ.
* The Omniture code doesn’t capture any private data such as payment information provided in the Gift Shop.
* Omniture does not have access to friends-only or private entries.
* You can opt out, and if you've already opted out, you'll stay that way.

As always, we are providing a way for any user to opt out of contributing to the stats-gathering (even though we know it runs the risk of statistically biasing our results). If you’d like to opt out, go to the Admin Console and type "set opt_exclude_stats 1". This opt out applies to the entire implementation of Omniture -- site-schemed pages and the new inclusion of journals, profiles and communities. If you've already opted out, you don't need to do so again.

We're looking forward to having more detailed data to help us make decisions about the best ways to improve the site!

If you aren't all that happy with the idea of Ominiture poking about when you are using other sites who happen to be clients of Omniture, go to this page and set the opt-out cookie.

For Firefox I had to manually set the cookie in my options (I've had some other places where cookies wouldn't set either).

That might seem belt and braces, but there you go.

Comments

[clownburner.livejournal.com]

no; you can't add the whole domain to the hosts file, so that's impractical. If you run your own DNS server, you could black hole it that way.

[starcat-jewel.livejournal.com]

I checked with my partner, who's the hardware-savvy one in the household. He says that if you have a router, you can identify the IP ranges used by 2o7.net and add them to the router's block-list -- and that he'll be doing that as soon as we're back from this weekend's con. The effect of doing this is to send any attempt at communication between your system and 2o7.net, from either side, straight into the bit-bucket.

[clownburner.livejournal.com]

That'll work, but since your browser doesn't know that 2o7 won't be responding, it may wait for those connections for a while, slowing performance.