So a side question - how many 'typical' users do we think might be using blockers? Particularly, how has that changed over time and do we need to factor that in when doing historical comparisons of stats, or do we think it's still pretty trivial? Sorry, that's slightly diverting the topic!

On a more related note, and a great lesson in unintentional breaches of privacy, I sent out a good few cautionary Twitter DMs after I launched A Street Near You when I found people tweeting things like "just found out there was a Private Alfred Smithers who lived in my house and died on 23 June 1916". It's understandable people wanting to share that but as it gives a pretty simple way to find out exactly where they live I don't think they'd thought it through!


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James Morley


On Wed, 19 Jun 2019 at 09:32, Mike Ellis <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
Hi Mar

There’s a conflation here which need some unpicking. I don’t think I have enough expertise to unpick it totally correctly, but here goes… {experts, please chip in!}

The way I understand it: 

GA and GDPR compliance is one thing. In theory, Google Analytics doesn’t allow (in fact it’s explicit in their terms) the collection of individually identifiable bits of information. Everything in there is in aggregate, and anonymised. (But - side note: I highly recommend spending some time looking at “User Explorer”: Audience > User Explorer - anonymised but super-interesting individual paths through your site…).

GA does collect IP’s but strips them. As I understand it you also have to go a further step (outlined here: https://www.jeffalytics.com/gdpr-ip-addresses-google-analytics/) but I would bet money that 99% of people/museums haven’t done this. Further info here: https://www.blastam.com/blog/gdpr-need-consent-for-google-analytics-tracking. Do popups about cookies mitigate this? I don’t think anyone quite knows, but we all hope that these make things ok...

In my mind the bigger issue is about tracking and fingerprinting, which is from pretty much every angle totally out of control. By “out of control” I mean I suspect literally no-one, not even the tech giants, have any idea how data is being moved around the internet. Those articles above show for example checkboxes about which data is shared “with Google partners”. Then those partners sell / share the data on. 

If I visit cornwalllive.com without my tracker-blocking browser / piHole for instance I’m prompted with a cookie popup box that asks me to ok 266 ad partners. That’s 266 directions that data can be sold in - that’s pretty much out of control before the next step of selling on! If you’re interested the list is here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1XaA0Reffj9E65FbvXU9bHfqurznOU0ESruO4WiiSoAU/edit?usp=sharing.

Attached is a screen grab showing our household network traffic from our https://pi-hole.net/ - 16% of all traffic is blocked, which means trackers/advertisers. 

This is the stuff that concerns me, both in terms of Google Analytics but also the wide institutional use of Facebook. I don’t think we should as a sector stop using these tools - that’d be foolish - but I do think having a really good awareness of the issues is pretty important. I don’t think we’ll ever fully understand it - it is just too complex - but knowing the basics seems a sensible thing..

Tehm / Jon - yup, aware you’re doing good work on this, would like to see/hear more!

cheers

Mike




_____________

Mike Ellis

Thirty8 Digital: a small but perfectly formed digital agency
http://thirty8.co.uk

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On 18 Jun 2019, 19:19 +0100, Mar Dixon <[log in to unmask]>, wrote:
I thought with GDPR and even before most of the data was stripped for the reports (like IP etc). 

I obviously could be wrong as don't use it on a daily basis

On Tue, 18 Jun 2019 at 16:18, Mike Ellis <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
Wondering: have any museums thought seriously about the ethics of using Google Analytics in this current climate of "big tech owns all the things" / "no-one knows where their data is" ?

I know a similar thoughtpiece could be thrown at Facebook / Twitter / Chrome / etc - but of all the obvious data-sharing-evils out there that museums have embraced, GA is probably the biggie.

I'm not asking because I think the sector should change - I'm actually fairly delighted that almost all museums have settled on a single, shareable, powerful resource for looking at their analytics - I'm just interested in whether the conversation ever comes up and what the arguments are for/against.

cheers

Mike




_____________________________


Mike Ellis 

Thirty8 Digital: a small but perfectly formed digital agency: http://thirty8.co.uk  

* Workshops, courses and free downloads: http://trainingdigital.co.uk *

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Mar Dixon

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