TMI - Too Much Information Unethical?
APR 19th 2008 • 3 Comments
My latest project in the form of goooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooogle.com/ (or g56ogle.com for short) has brought up an interesting ethical dillema for me. About a week ago I launched the site to serve basically as a re-skinned version of google.com. It gives users the ability to search the web in style. It's powered with Google's Adsense for Search, which allows me to simply throw the code in to handle all the actual searching functionality. When a user enters a search term and hits return they're taken to a results page, and the URL in their browser changes to something like this: "http://www.goo...oogle.com/results/?q=andrew+baron....". The search query is clearly indicated inside the actual URL. Now this might not seem to really matter because there's no way for me to actually see all the queries that people enter.
What ethical dillema?
So where does the ethical dillema come in? On the results page, on the footer of the site is a link to my website, exit42design.com. So what happens is, when somebody who is on the results page clicks on the link to my site the analytics for my site record where they're coming from. It's useful to see what sites are linking to you, and where your traffic is coming from. Since launching g56ogle I've been getting several links to my site from there. So what's happening is that Mint (my analytics software) records the URL that a user came from when entering exit42design and shows it to me. So when they click over to exit42design from the results page, the entire URL (with the search query they entered) gets sent over to Mint as a referral URL. Then, I see it pop up in my RSS reader as a new referrer. As illustrated below:
Is this unethical?
So would you consider this to be crossing the line of what's ethical? Granted, I can't see every single search that is made on the site, I can only see the queries that people make when they just happen to click on the link to my website in the footer on the results page. The search query they enter and their coming over to my site afterwards are in no way related, so this is not just seeing queries that led them to exit42design.com - I'm seeing general, non-specific queries that are being made.
It should also be pointed out that I'm seeing only a very small percentage of the overal number of queries made, and they are in no way related to any particular user, or even location. All I see is what you see in the above image, the results page URL. But I still feel as though an ethical line has been crossed. What do you think?
posted in: Internet |
Cam Collins • Apr 19th 2008 • 1:53 pm
Ok, now I see what you're saying. Hard to explain in 140 characters. :)
I don't think there's an ethical problem unless you have some way of tying the search to the person's identity (other than his/her IP, and I'm sure you're not trying to track people down with that).
If you're worried, though, you could always create an "About this site" page or something like that, with no search functionality, and link to you site from that page only.
Dave Joyce • Apr 19th 2008 • 2:03 pm
Yeah, sometimes twitter hits a limit. =)
True enough point though. Honestly, I don't think I would really care either, since it's not tied to my identity, but it just struck me as the sort of thing that some people might care about.
So I'm interested to know what people think.
Charles Mason • Apr 23rd 2008 • 4:14 pm
Hi Dave,
Sorry and great to read you are busy for the next few weeks! ;-) I can understand where you are coming from but unless you start perusing the information to extrapolate data about a specific user, then you are fine.
At our website, we receive an average of 30-40k unique visitors a month and I use to get a kick at seeing this information. But the reality is this is exactly what the analytic applications do for you. It reviews this information and provides us with the list of keywords, phases, which search engine, the geo location(s) of the users, the IP, the internet provider, browser, colors depth of their screen, plug-ins installed, java and jscript turned on, screen resolution... etc. etc. etc. While, I understand that you are looking at this from the prospective of privacy as uses aren't using the search terms to get to your site, Google Adword, Overture (yahoo), etc use this information for their benefits, not that make this question or answer any different. So no, it not unethical.
Ok, not a 140 word or less but it gets the point across. ;-)