Complete Web Monitoring

A Note on Privacy: Tracking People

Throughout this book, we’ll be looking at user activity on the Web. Integrating analytical data with user identity will help your business. But integrating user data also has important moral and legal implications for privacy.

To make sense of what’s happening online, you need to stitch together a huge amount of data: page retrievals, blog mentions, survey results, referring sites, performance metrics, and more. Taken alone, each is just an isolated data point. Taken together, however, they reveal a larger pattern—one you can use to make business decisions. They also show you the activities of individual users.

Collecting data on individuals’ surfing habits and browsing activities is risky and fraught with moral pitfalls. In some jurisdictions, you have a legal obligation to tell visitors what you’re collecting, and in the event of a security breach, to inform them that their data may have been compromised.

As a result, you need to balance your desire for complete web visibility with the risks of collecting personally identifiable information. This means deciding what you’ll collect, how long you’ll store it, whether you’ll store it in aggregate or down to the individual visit, and who gets access to the data. It also means being open about your collection policies and giving visitors a way to opt out in plain, simple terms, not buried away in an obscure Terms of Service document nobody reads.

Being concerned with privacy is more than just knowing ...