Updates to Omniture on LiveJournal

[theljstaff]

We’re making a change to the way we've been gathering statistics on LiveJournal and wanted to let you know the plan and details in advance.

Back in January, we announced that we'd start using Omniture SiteCatalyst as the system that lets us dig deeper into how members and visitors use LiveJournal. Back then, we had only used Omniture's tracking

Comments

[entropy_house]

I personally would prefer it if information gathering schemes were all it Opt-IN. As it is, unless you are friended to LJ-BIZ, which is not even a default friended journal, you won't know that you have the option to opt-out.

[teostra]

I agree it should be an opt-in situation.

[jawastew]

I don't have any of the official LJ comms friended, they all show up in updates on the homepage under the LJ News box. I see an update and figure, I should check it out and see if it's related to something I'm interested in.

[entropy_house]

I despise the homepage and never go to it. I have my flist as a favorite and go from there. I'm sure I'm not the only one who does that. If LJ is mentioning something that they feel people might like to opt out of, then I think it only sensible to mention it on a comm which they recommend people friend when they sign up.

[entropy_house]

If it wasn't for LJ rubbing my fur the wrong way all the time, I wouldn't be so prickly about relatively unimportant stuff like this. :^)

[entropy_house]

*grin* Oh, I expected it was standard practice, it's just that LJ was my *country* and I keep feebly whimpering because our Beloved King was replaced by an Evil Overlord.

[anotherdream]

Opt-in would likely skew the statistics to the point of being unusable, which is why the standard is defaulting. Heck, I don't know of many sites that even let you opt out.

[entropy_house]

Actually, it's probably the excuse they give for doing it that annoys me most. data to help us make decisions about the best ways to improve the site!

They've been repeatedly offered input from the users. They said they wanted input from the users but they repeatedly make decisions/policy changes/ coding changes etc. that cover the very issues users had said were most important to them, without giving any opportunity for the users to give input.

If they were just the teensiest bit honest and said 'we're collecting this data because we think that it might be profitable to us' then we wouldn't have the false expectation that they *care* how we feel about them collecting it. Other sites that do stats-gathering don't pretend to be using the information for your benefit, so you don't expect them to ask you for permission to do it.

[detailbear]

I think it's more "we're collecting this data because it will be cheaper to hire an outside company to compile this indirect data and analyze it for us than it would be to hire enough people to read, copy, sort, compile and summarize all the posts, serious or crap, that would be generated if we asked for user input and more than 0.1% of the users replied."