[PD-dev] Survey (was Re: opt-in usage statistics 'phone home')

Chris McCormick chris at mccormick.cx
Sun Nov 12 04:25:18 CET 2006


On Sat, Nov 11, 2006 at 06:21:50PM -0500, Hans-Christoph Steiner wrote:
> >I am against the idea of Pd 'phoning home' for the same reasons as  
> >Tim,
> 
> I am a strong advocate of privacy, and I think this can be done  
> without any violation of privacy.  There are a number of ways to do  
> this:
> 
> - having it an opt-in
> - make it overt (i.e. pops up a window to ask permission each time)
> - make the code open-source (people can see exactly what it is doing)
> - make the unique ID a resettable random number (i.e. stored in prefs)
> 
> If you have cookie support turned on in your browser, then you are  
> being tracked.  99% of people allow cookies at least some of the  
> time.  Most of the time none of the above conditions apply to how  
> websites use cookies.
> 
> Then, on top of this, I think it is very good to have working  
> examples of how to do this while maintaining privacy.  Right now,  
> companies, governments, etc. implement such systems with few privacy  
> protections because its easier and there aren't working examples of  
> how to do it better.

Sounds like Debian's "popularity contest". Ok, I'm convinced.

> >and I think it would be too hard to get the code into all the  
> >different
> >versions of Pd out there anyway.
> 
> It would be trivial to get the code into Pd-extended.

Cool!

Chris.

-------------------
chris at mccormick.cx
http://mccormick.cx




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