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I used to be the web master for a major hospital website. If there is
anything that is protected more than health care data these days, it
must be under the auspices of a three letter acronym government agency.
We used Google Analytics to track and analyze data on our web servers.
We could see how many users had Firefox, IE 6, Opera, etc. and what OS
they used. We could tell, for each page on our server, where users came
from, where they went afterwards. what search terms they typed in to get
to a page, how many pages they visited, and how long they stayed on each
page. And more.
Is this invasion of privacy or website usage? It's website usage. I
could in no way tell who visited the prostate cancer page, but I could
tell how many people did and how long they stayed there and, with some
study and analysis, determine which of the two dozen prostate
cancer-related web pages they visited - and didn't visit.
Does this invade anyone's privacy? no. Does it provide a valuable
analytical tool to someone developing web sites,? You bet. Is any data
transmitted to anyplace other that the server that serves up the
specific pages? No.
From what Sharon is saying - and full disclosure here, I know Sharon
and have known her for many years, and have a great deal of respect for
her personal integrity, but I haven't used her products - what they
capture is NO different from what anyone running a web server captures
about the traffic on their web site.
The information is - I trust, SB please correct me if I'm wrong - only
available to the people who administer the server. It's not available to
Madcap, only to the people who administer the server that runs the help
system. The information doesn't actually go anywhere - it stays on the
server where it is captured. And it doesn't tell anyone anything about
what a specific person did. It only tracks and remembers that someone
came into the site on page x, went to page y, searched for term "foo",
etc. And none of this information ever leaves the server that they
accessed. It just sits around in case someone in the web site admin team
decides to run a report to look and see what pages got looked at and
what ones didn't.
My 2¢,
John G
Sharon Burton said the following on 9/25/2009 1:25 PM:
> See below.
>
>
Free Software Documentation Project Web Cast: Covers developing Table of
Contents, Context IDs, and Index, as well as Doc-To-Help
2009 tips, tricks, and best practices. http://www.doctohelp.com/SuperPages/Webcasts/
Help & Manual 5: The complete help authoring tool for individual
authors and teams. Professional power, intuitive interface. Write
once, publish to 8 formats. Multi-user authoring and version control! http://www.helpandmanual.com/
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