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 > > ------ > > 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