Pictures of Microsofts up and coming adCenter (think competitor to Google Analytics for most intents and purposes) have been leaked. You can find them here.
Microsoft's Ian Thomas (who works in Microsoft's Digital Advertising Solutions group) responds on his blog here.
Its very interesting to see that Microsoft is going beyond standard web analytics capabilities and is going so far to blend in other data sources such as Microsoft Passport registration information. This allows the analytics to show trending on metrics previously unavailable to a site. For example if the user has logged into any Microsoft service (hotmail, MSN, MSDN, etc..) and then hits a site running MS adCenter analytics, the site will be able to see demographic data such as gender breakdown. This applies even on data points not collected by the site, even for people that haven't registered with the site.
Its uncertain what the privacy issues are to this approach - I'm sure legally Microsoft is permitted to do this based on the user agreements for passport, however is it ethical?
I actually think it is - the data is kept at the aggregate level so its giving web site operators key data without being able to identify any user. However if they want to target to this data they will need to collect the data point from user.
1 comment:
You could find a review on Gatineau implementation at
http://www.analytics20.org/tools/microsoft-gatineu-review-first-part/
with regards to privacy concerns on personal information
http://www.analytics20.org/web-analytics/relax-microsoft-gatineau-demographic-information-is-well-protected/
Cheers,
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