Author Topic: Gov tracks whose on what Gov website and how you got there  (Read 3780 times)

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AD

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Gov tracks whose on what Gov website and how you got there
« on: March 19, 2015, 02:50:56 PM »
At 11:23 a.m. on Thursday, 150,980 people -- more than the population of Alexandria, Virginia -- were browsing U.S. federal websites. Five thousand of them visited an IRS.gov page called "Where's my Refund?" Another 2,091 were checking forecasts on Weather.gov.

These stats come from a new dashboard tracking user behavior on federal websites -- what they're looking at, what device they use, as well as their browser and operating system. The White House's U.S. Digital Service, along with two General Services Administration's tech teams, 18F and the Digital Analytics Program, launched the site Thursday.

Created over the course of two to three weeks, the site debuted during Sunshine Week, a national effort dedicated to government transparency.

The data could help federal digital service teams focus on the "services that matter most to the American people" by helping government agencies "understand how people find, access and use government services online," a White House blog post announcing the site said.

The real-time data is gathered by a Google Analytics account for federal digital services, and the blog post noted the program doesn't track individuals and anonymizes the IP addresses of visitors.

For now, the system covers less than 300 executive branch domains, out of 1,350 domains in total. (Government groups interested in adding their site are asked to email the Digital Analytics Program.)

Read more here

http://www.nextgov.com/cio-briefing/2015/03/new-service-tracks-which-Federal-sites-youre-and-how-you-got-there/107946/
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spacecase0

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Re: Gov tracks whose on what Gov website and how you got there
« Reply #1 on: March 19, 2015, 03:52:18 PM »
so what next ?
a Vaccination registration system ?
http://www.naturalnews.com/049051_gun_control_vaccine_registration_medical_freedom.html

they are going for total control,
no other reason for the actions they take

Cindy

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Re: Gov tracks whose on what Gov website and how you got there
« Reply #2 on: March 21, 2015, 02:50:20 AM »
The data has been collected for years decades.  Only recently have they given the public access to it.

-Cindy
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Tevin

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Re: Gov tracks whose on what Gov website and how you got there
« Reply #3 on: March 28, 2015, 07:52:33 AM »
Simply collecting web traffic metrics is not in itself bad. Many if not most private websites do it. It provides very useful user data on visitor likes and dislikes, how often a link is shared on social media, a visitor's general geographical locale, etc.

Like everything else, it's what they do with the information that counts. Data is neither inherently good nor bad.

But I'm going to guess since the government is involved, not much good will come from this.



mousewizard

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Re: Gov tracks whose on what Gov website and how you got there
« Reply #4 on: March 28, 2015, 10:34:48 AM »
The data has been collected for years decades.  Only recently have they given the public access to it.

-Cindy
The data has always been collected by Web servers. Like since the beginning. It's been stored in log files and there's no standard for log file structure, so different servers did it differently. Only recently has someone bothered to write the software that allows this to happen.

It's used mostly to find pages where people arrive, where they depart, most visited, and problem pages. It's used for server optimization, so that's the good. For the bad, well, I guess they could try to track where people were coming from and going to, so if you're worried about that, open a new tab in your browser before going or coming and use that.
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