– In any other context there would be outrage that data like these are being collected over an insecure connection.
– You give less information to get an insurance quote. Passing a username may contravene rules (depending upon how it’s done). – GA prohibits collection of personally identifiable information (PII). It’s only when combined with a ‘mundane’ unique identifier (username) that it crosses the creepy line. – Logging the ‘scary’ stuff is pretty mundane in itself – that is, when collected anonymously and in aggregate. In BuzzFeed’s defense, I’m sure when they set up the tracking in the first place they didn’t foresee that they’d be recording data from quizzes of this personal depth. This is just a single example, but I suspect this particular quiz would have had less than 2 million views if everyone completing it realised every click was being recorded & could potentially be reported on later – whether that data is fully identifiable back to individual users, or pseudonymous, or even totally anonymous.Ī few thoughts, without a cohesive narrative…
Each quiz answer on BuzzFeed has a unique ID like this.
Either way, everything we’ve covered so far is quite mundane. that they’re able to link the data they’re recording in Google Analytics about my activity on the site back to my email address and other personally identifiable information). If I log in using 2 different browsers right now, it assigns me that same username string, but I’m going to caveat that I’m not 100% sure they’re recording that it is ‘me’ browsing the site (ie. I think that’s recording my user status, and an encoded version of my username. Within this you can also see it records ‘username’.