Data, Web Logs, Databases.

Hi, I am very confused about the difference between serving cookies from
one section of a site and when data is stored in logs or in databases. I
have a couple of questions here I need serious guidance on I hope someone 
can help.

If I am a publisher, and I have contests on my site -- and someone enters
a contest with their personal information, and then goes to browse the
rest of our site -- a "baldness cure" page for example. We use a globalID
cookie to track recurrent visitors.

So if I implement P3P -- am I required to say I collect personally 
identifiable health information?

Another example is -- say I use among other things a GUID to configure my
ad server to serve new ads to a user, that same user has expressed a 
preference in our forums to have a 2 pane layout when they view our 
forums. They have signed up for a user name in the forum. We use the same 
GUID across the site.

Now say it is our corporate policy NOT to monitor those forums, BUT the 
user posts frequently in the "Let's lose weight because I'm fat" forum.

The user maintains, on another machine on our domain a web page for his 
church group. As part of the web page, he posts his email and phone number 
and mailing address, so the peoplein his church can send him pictures to 
post on the web site.

Are we also holding personally identifiable health information for him?

You can assume for these examples that all our databases for the company 
are one copy of Oracle on one machine. And so are our web logs.

I'm going to stop here and not even get into referers etc in the logs 
because that would over complicate the basic question as it is posed here.
Thanks, I hope someone can help me!

Janice Abrahams



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Received on Tuesday, 26 March 2002 15:50:54 UTC