From: Ken Masters <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Mon, 17 Feb 2014 11:53:56 +0400
Hi All
Yes, Ghostery is an extremely useful tool; it's what I used in my
research (and what I used to find out that the LibLicense page was
using Google Analytics).
Another useful Firefox plugin is "TrackMeNot". This is for users who
are concerned that sites are happily tracking their searches on search
engines. TrackMeNot is a very simple plug-in that just repeatedly
runs random searches in the background, using different search engines
(you can change settings as you wish). This means that you generate
so much noise that, when you do actually conduct a search, your search
pattern is hidden in the noise and can't be identified by anyone
tracking you.
Regards
Ken
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On 17 February 2014 04:19, LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> From: Joseph Esposito <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Thu, 13 Feb 2014 20:26:58 -0500
>
> I was recently made aware of a tool called Ghostery
> (http://ghostery.com) that shows you all the tracking devices used
> when you visit a Web site. My thanks to Gary Price for pointing this
> tool out to me. (Follow Gary @infodocket.)
>
> I just began to play with Ghostery and have found some surprising
> items. My plan is to use it with a couple dozen university presses to
> see what kind of tracking mechanisms they use, perhaps unknowingly. I
> am not picking on the U. press community, which I admire. I am doing
> this to explore what it means to sell books directly from Web sites
> and what kind of privacy issues are raised by such sales. I would
> welcome comments about this, whether online or off.
>
> In my first foray with Ghostery I went to all the major Internet sites
> (Amazon, Facebook, Netflix, etc.). The number of trackers is very
> high, as you would expect. Nothing on the Google site, though. I
> don't understand why. The NY Public Library site has 3 trackers. Is
> that good or bad? I don't yet know how to evaluate this.
>
> My gut feeling is that those of us who work in or around
> not-for-profit organizations (most of my consulting time now is spent
> with NFPs) have to begin to work on these emergent privacy issues. I
> don't have strong feelings about these issues one way or the other,
> but, gosh, I would like to know about them.
>
> Joe Esposito
>
>
> On Thu, Feb 13, 2014 at 2:48 PM, LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>>
>> From: Ken Masters <[log in to unmask]>
>> Date: Thu, 13 Feb 2014 07:50:51 +0100
>>
>> Hi All
>>
>> I think Joe is correct. And I think part of the reason is that, in
>> huge organisations, so much responsibility has been handed over to IT
>> staff, that very little of what they do is known to senior management
>> (apart from the IT staff who serve in senior management, of course).
>>
>> This is a very real problem, because senior management tends to
>> classify everything to do with computers as "IT stuff," and fails to
>> see that what their IT staff does reflects directly on the
>> institution, especially when institutional ethics are involved. In
>> this case, the IT staff will know that they are collecting data, but
>> it is likely that the senior management don't know about it. (For
>> example, how many librarians on this list have ever asked their IT
>> staff about what information they are gathering on their users, how,
>> where and for how long the data are stored, and discussed the ethics
>> of that?).
>>
>> To answer your question regarding instances of tracking by
>> organisations: I don't know of any, but the study of such tracking by
>> medical organisations that I mentioned in my previous mail can be
>> found at http://ispub.com/IJMI/6/2/14386
>>
>> I attempted to follow up on that study by surveying the medical
>> organisations, trying to get their opinion on how much they knew about
>> the data gathering, and how this fitted in with medical ethics (given
>> that there was almost no informed consent on the data gathering). I
>> received a 1% responses rate, so, obviously, could not publish
>> anything. Apart from normal low response rates to surveys, I would
>> think that the non-response rate probably had to do with
>> organisations' closing ranks, or, because it would have been seen as
>> "IT stuff," would have been forwarded to the IT dept, and they
>> certainly would not have responded.
>>
>> Regards
>>
>> Ken
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