Competitive Edge or Spying?
5 December 2005 – 7:47 pm
Last year before launching my Flash Portfolio website I created a history tracking feature to help me with debugging and GUI testing.
It was a great feature that helped me fine tune some of the sites functions. Initially the information was only sent to me after a test user sent me a comment and/or bug report.
However, after I finished testing the website and removed it from the web-version I started the process of creating the CD version. It was then when I realized that my CD version would have a limited, trackable audience and that my debugging tool could be very useful.
Twenty minutes later I add two functions to the CD version of my Portfolio:
- One that notified me when a perspective employer opened my Portfolio CD and
- Another that sent me their viewing history / time after they quit.
Proud of my idea and how well it worked I told a few people about it. Most of my friends thought it was a cool idea and actually implemented it in their own projects, but one of my buddies kept referring to it as spyware.
The word spyware seemed a little extreme.
Do the “rules” of stats collection change that much based on the medium (Internet vs CD)?
While the stats collected detailed what pages that where viewed and for how long, is it really any different from collecting user stats from a website?
