Goooogle is encouraging webmasters to create privacy policies for their websites, pages which outline any data collection practices and those sorts of issues on the site. So, here's the privacypolicy for GFM.
GFM is currently hosted by blogspot.com, and any datamining they do is out of my hands. That includes the general Google Privacy Policy, since blogspot is owned by the big G. However, I looked at the policy for blogspot and all the stuff they mentioned is for authors. It doesn't look like they do any information harvesting for readers beyond any normal stuff that comes with surfing the web. Obviously, if you leave a comment or anything like that, it'll be recorded, but I'll never see your IP address or anything like that, much less publish it.
As for me, I use a cookie to track whether my customers arrived via a search engine or via any other means. If you're interested in this, check out my article, Teaching Myself JavaScript. Why do I care where a reader came from? Because I only want to serve ads to people who came from searching. The thing is, JavaScript can apparently only check the immediate referrer, so I can only detect a searchengine reader on the very first page they view. If they follow some links deeper into GFMan, then the referrer will just be glowingfaceman.com. The only way for me to "remember" who came from a serp and who didn't, is to give the searchers a cookie. The cookie expires within a day (since many first-time users convert into regulars once they see the great value I provide). It's all honor system anyway since anyone can disable cookies or delete cookies.
Speaking of ads, I use Google Adsense, for contextual ad placement, and I've heard at some point they're going to start tracking what things people click and look at so they can customize the ads not just based on the webpage but also on the reader. Of course, if you're a regular reader, this won't even effect you since I only show ads to searching visitors.
Finally, I use Google Analytics to analyze my traffic. Mostly I use that to see what kinds of keywords are leading people here from the serps, which helps me get a feel for what you all are interested in. When you start a large blog like this, you're surprised how certain articles really soar which you didn't expect, and others tank. For example, my article A Modern Version of the Lord's Prayer, I wrote that in like fifteen minutes while I was exhausted after a long day of registering voters, and it gets lots of new eyeballs. On the other hand, I put a lot of time and effort into writing Openness, which I was hoping would be a big success. It got some social bookmarking patronage, but it barely pulls in anything from the engines :(
The GoogleAnalytics javascript I host, which allows GA to give me traffic reports, currently appears to issue three cookies. Probably so they can determine which browser is "new" and which is not, or something of that nature. I don't actually know for sure. All I know is at the end of the day I get lots of neat charts and graphs and numbers :) Don't worry though, whatever it is, I never see any private info from anyone like IP Addresses or anything.
Hope that clears up all the suspense you no doubt had about whether or not I collect private info. Now here are some articles you can enjoy...
FURTHER READING
Read about my time in Air Force Boot Camp. We didn't enjoy much private life in the dorms of Lackland...
Read about the differences between kanji and romaji, as well as what the heck these even are.
Read my comparison between Anki and Mnemosyne, two Spaced Repetition Systems which I've used.
Check out my Toastmasters Speech Contest Liveblog, a minute-by-minute report on a speaking competition I took part in.
GFM is currently hosted by blogspot.com, and any datamining they do is out of my hands. That includes the general Google Privacy Policy, since blogspot is owned by the big G. However, I looked at the policy for blogspot and all the stuff they mentioned is for authors. It doesn't look like they do any information harvesting for readers beyond any normal stuff that comes with surfing the web. Obviously, if you leave a comment or anything like that, it'll be recorded, but I'll never see your IP address or anything like that, much less publish it.
As for me, I use a cookie to track whether my customers arrived via a search engine or via any other means. If you're interested in this, check out my article, Teaching Myself JavaScript. Why do I care where a reader came from? Because I only want to serve ads to people who came from searching. The thing is, JavaScript can apparently only check the immediate referrer, so I can only detect a searchengine reader on the very first page they view. If they follow some links deeper into GFMan, then the referrer will just be glowingfaceman.com. The only way for me to "remember" who came from a serp and who didn't, is to give the searchers a cookie. The cookie expires within a day (since many first-time users convert into regulars once they see the great value I provide). It's all honor system anyway since anyone can disable cookies or delete cookies.
Speaking of ads, I use Google Adsense, for contextual ad placement, and I've heard at some point they're going to start tracking what things people click and look at so they can customize the ads not just based on the webpage but also on the reader. Of course, if you're a regular reader, this won't even effect you since I only show ads to searching visitors.
Finally, I use Google Analytics to analyze my traffic. Mostly I use that to see what kinds of keywords are leading people here from the serps, which helps me get a feel for what you all are interested in. When you start a large blog like this, you're surprised how certain articles really soar which you didn't expect, and others tank. For example, my article A Modern Version of the Lord's Prayer, I wrote that in like fifteen minutes while I was exhausted after a long day of registering voters, and it gets lots of new eyeballs. On the other hand, I put a lot of time and effort into writing Openness, which I was hoping would be a big success. It got some social bookmarking patronage, but it barely pulls in anything from the engines :(
The GoogleAnalytics javascript I host, which allows GA to give me traffic reports, currently appears to issue three cookies. Probably so they can determine which browser is "new" and which is not, or something of that nature. I don't actually know for sure. All I know is at the end of the day I get lots of neat charts and graphs and numbers :) Don't worry though, whatever it is, I never see any private info from anyone like IP Addresses or anything.
Hope that clears up all the suspense you no doubt had about whether or not I collect private info. Now here are some articles you can enjoy...
FURTHER READING
Read about my time in Air Force Boot Camp. We didn't enjoy much private life in the dorms of Lackland...
Read about the differences between kanji and romaji, as well as what the heck these even are.
Read my comparison between Anki and Mnemosyne, two Spaced Repetition Systems which I've used.
Check out my Toastmasters Speech Contest Liveblog, a minute-by-minute report on a speaking competition I took part in.
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1 comments:
Are you making any money from the ads?
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