full disclosure

[cellio]

A discussion in another journal has caused me to realize that what seems an innocuous action to me might be objectionable to others. So, disclosure and an invitation to discuss, if you care to:

I sometimes use a sort of "web bug" in my posts so I can collect limited access data (which data LJ does not provide). I did this initially out of simple curiosity, but soon realized that I could use it to find out (without asking) which of my posts get read more (or less). While I write primarily for myself, it's worth knowing if there are certain classes of posts that my readers tend to ignore. Secondarily, this also gives me some idea of where my "secondary" (non-LJ-subscriber) readers might be coming from, which is casually interesting.

To me this seems akin to someone who hosts his own blog reviewing the server logs. To others, I'm learning, this is akin to "spying". While lj-toys does try to report which LJ users are reading what, it's far from reliable. You'll have to take my word for it that I'm not really looking at that; I've got much better things to do than to peruse logs so I can say "aha! so-and-so claims to be my friend but never reads me!".

At the bottom of this post is a one-pixel image file. (If I could use something more blatant, I would.) If you're using Firefox and the AdBlock extension, you can block that image and lj-toys will never see hits from you. If you're using some other browser, I'm afraid I don't know how you can disable it.

If you feel that what I'm doing is objectionable, I would like to understand where you're coming from (here or privately, as you like).

Comments

[giddysinger.livejournal.com]

For what it's worth, I could care less about whether you have a way of tracking whether I personally view your posts. I think it's fairly self-evident that if you are on my friends list it is because I want to read your entries, which makes it a fairly trivial datum. (Not to mention that I comment frequently enough that it's pretty obvious that I read.) If I didn't have an LJ account (or is that _a_ LJ account?) or if you had an account over on Blogspot or some such, you would see that you have a reader from Silver Spring, MD with VzDSL -- you might then put the clues together and figure out that it was either me or Teh Geek. Either way, I just can't bring myself to view any of this as some kind of invasion of privacy.