Metrics and your privacy

[Jack Spaar]

On Mon, 27 Nov 2006 11:18:55 +0000, Alan wrote:

> UUIDs are recognized as a *less* invasive mechanism for counting than
> the use of IP addresses and mirror logs. The latter may well identify
> individuals, their physical location (often down to the street name with
> DSL), and if it ever meets advertisers data their purchasing patterns.
[*snipped*]

The UUID gives out *more* information than they have now. It is proposed
for its information-revealing value (demultiplexing NATs and dynamic IP
changes), not it's privacy-protecting value.

IP addresses are already always given out to any website you ever contact.
 If Fedora Universe (?) wants to analyze their server logs like everyone
else, more power to them.

If they are privacy conscious, they will discard the raw IP logs after
collecting non-identifying statistics on a monthly or periodic basis.

But a randomly generated Universally Unique Identifier will still be
uniquely identifying, by definition.  To require this cookie is to create
an admission price for Fedora, however small, that doesn't exist now and
isn't needed to get a useful metric of Fedora's popularity.

--Jack Spaar