In the wake of the Pearson social media monitoring controversy, edubloggers like Audrey Watters and D’arcy Norman have announced their policies regarding code that can potentially track users on their blogs. This is a good idea, so we are following their example.
We use Google Analytics and WordPress analytics on both e-Literate and e-Literate TV. The main reason we do so is that we believe the information these packages provide help us create more useful content. Even after a decade of blogging, we are still surprised sometimes by which posts earn your attention and which ones don’t. We look at our analytics results fairly regularly to see what we can learn about writing more content that you find to be worth your time. This is by no means the only or even the main way that we decide what we will write, but we think of it as one of relatively few clues we have to understand to which posts and topics will have the most value to you. We do not run ads and have no intention of doing so in the future. In the case of e-Literate TV, where the content is expensive to make, we may also use information regarding the number of viewers of the episodes in the future to demonstrate to sponsors that our content is having an impact. We make no effort to track individuals and, in fact, have always had a policy of letting our readers comment on posts without registering on the site. But Google in particular is likely making more extensive use of the usage data that they gather.
In addition to the two analytics packages mentioned above, we do embed YouTube videos and use social media buttons, which may carry their own tracking code with them from the companies that supply them. Unfortunately, this is just part of the deal with embedding YouTube videos or adding convenient “Tweet this” links. The tracking code (which usually, but not always, means the same thing as “cookies”) on our site is pretty typical for what you will find for any site that provides these sorts of conveniences.
But that doesn’t mean that you have to allow yourself to be tracked if you prefer not to be. There are a number of excellent anti-tracking plugins available for the mainstream browsers, including Ghostery and Disconnect. If you are concerned about being tracked (here or anywhere), then we recommend installing one or more of these plugins, and we also recommend spending a little time to learn how they work and what sorts of tracking code are embedded on the different sites you visit so that you can make informed and fine-grained decisions about what information you do and do not want to share. These tools often let you make service-by-service and site-by-site decisions, but they generally start with the default of protecting your privacy by blocking everything.
To sum up and clarify our privacy policies:
- We do use Google Analytics and WordPress analytics.
- We do embed social media tools that in some cases carry their own tracking code.
- We do not make any effort to track individuals on our sites.
- We do not use or plan to use analytics for ads or in any way sell the information from our analytics to third parties, including but not limited to ads.
- We may in the future provide high-level summaries of site traffic and video views to e-Literate TV sponsors.
- We do support commenting on blog posts without registration.1
- We do provide our full posts in our RSS feed, which excludes most (but not all) tracking code.
- We do provide CC-BY licensing on our content so that it can be used on other sites, including ones that do not have any tracking code .
- Note: We do require an email address from commenters for the sole purpose of providing us with a means of contacting the poster in the event that the person has written something uncivil or marginally inappropriate and we need to discuss the matter with that person privately before deciding what to do about moderation. In the 10-year history of e-Literate, this has happened about three or four times. There are two differences relevant to reader privacy between requiring the email address and requiring registration. First, we allow people to use multiple email addresses or even temporary email addresses if they do not wish that email to be personally identifiable. We only require that the email address be a working address. Second and probably more importantly, without registration, there is no mechanism to link comments to browsing behavior on the site. [↩]
This is pretty much what I do too but have not articulated / posted the policy recently. This reminds me that I should. This will be a useful model — I will also share this with the Public Education Bloggers Network and ask that something similar be added to the posted code of blogging ethics.
Thanks for the disclosure and the model. EFF has good policy /use statements too
I use WP, Blogger and Tumblr. Good point about the email — fyi that’s the way Tumblr lets you manage notes and submissions with being registered. I did not notice Blogger having a setting for requiring an email address but will check again and ask about it.