Demographics workshop information... (Hit count reporting).

I talked to Rohit Khare here who attended the demographics workshop.

As you might expect, the issues are split between different camps
of people.  The advertising folks would like to have your life history,
just because it might be possible.  Other major ISP's  (e.g. AOL) might
want to sell some data, rather than give it away.

Other attendees point out that there are major legal issues around
privacy, particularly in Europe, so the extreme advertizing position is
legally untenable, to what degree however is not clear at this time.

It sounded to me like the hit reporting scheme we discussed last Friday
would be about as much as we could do in the 1.1 timeframe; I believe
we should do that much to encourage people to allow caching.

Rohit did point out that people want to know very much not only that
a document has been hit, but that it was cancelled before delivery
was complete.  This is how webmasters track down GIFS or boring pages.
Adding this much to the simple hit count reporting seems like the point
in the design space we should shoot for.  So reporting both
hits and cancelled hits on a URL would be the extent of hit reporting.
Anything more than this brings us into the privacy and legallity morass
that makes me believe any further work in this area is beyond the 1.1
timeframe.

Rohit, any further comments you care to make?
				- Jim

Received on Thursday, 8 February 1996 16:58:34 UTC