From: Ken Masters <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Wed, 5 Feb 2014 16:11:32 +0100
Hi All
As Eric points out, many websites routinely collect data. More than
that, in many cases, in the act of collecting, they share the data
with third parties, and there is no such thing as informed consent
(although I see some websites are now doing some informing).
Another useful tool for checking on who is collecting your data is
Ghostery - a Firefox plugin. (It can also be used to block the
cookies). I did a study a few years ago which showed that Medical
Association websites were happily using a range of tools to gather
user information and simply not informing visitors. If they do it
without concern, one can expect most others to do it also.
In fact, the liblicense page (http://liblicense.crl.edu/) uses Google
Analytics too.
Regards
Ken
------
Dr. Ken Masters
Asst. Professor: Medical Informatics
Medical Education Unit
College of Medicine & Health Sciences
Sultan Qaboos University
Sultanate of Oman
E-i-C: The Internet Journal of Medical Education
____/\\/********\\/\\____
On 5 February 2014 00:46, LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> From: Eric Hellman <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Tue, 4 Feb 2014 09:48:53 -0500
>
> Joe,
>
> You need to learn how to use Chrome's Developer tools. I'm willing to
> bet that there aren't any university presses in the US that aren't
> using cookies in some way, although perhaps they don't realize that
> they're doing it.
>
> As a representative example (not to pick on them, or anything)
> University of Chicago Press uses Google Analytics on its web site,
> which uses 4 cookies to track users across the website. It also uses
> "scorecard research" which sets 3 more cookies. It uses previews from
> google books- 10 more cookies. It uses "Addthis.com". Another 12
> cookies. If I add to the shopping cart, I get 12 cookies from
> uchicago.edu itself.
>
> So yeah, the people you've been talking to have no clue about cookies.
>
> Eric
>
> Eric Hellman
> President, Gluejar.Inc.
> Founder, Unglue.it https://unglue.it/
> http://go-to-hellman.blogspot.com/
> twitter: @gluejar
>
> On Feb 2, 2014, at 6:27 PM, LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
>> One hypothesis I had when I started out was that U. presses could have
>> trouble selling D2C because of privacy policies of the parent
>> institutions (that is, commercial organizations have fewer scruples
>> about collecting user data). Now I am beginning to think I formulated
>> this question all wrong. It's my understanding, based on a number of
>> interviews with U. press personnel, that presses collect little user
>> data and don't distribute it often or widely. I have stumbled on no
>> academic book publisher yet that places cookies on users' computers,
>> which significantly reduces the amount of information a publisher
>> could collect. Have I simply been talking to the wrong people?
>
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