Drawn-Mario In reply to ??? [2014-03-19 08:31:40 +0000 UTC]

it's ok but it's pretty bullshit that it's only for premiums...

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Anolee In reply to ??? [2014-03-19 08:29:35 +0000 UTC]

I LOVE statistics.

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BillyNikoll In reply to ??? [2014-03-19 08:16:26 +0000 UTC]

Unacceptable!

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AratoYui In reply to ??? [2014-03-19 08:03:42 +0000 UTC]

I dont understand why everyone has the need to complain. This is great for professional artist who wish to know more about their traffic and how to eventually increase it. Dont like it?! -dont use it. 

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formatela In reply to AratoYui [2014-03-21 23:17:48 +0000 UTC]

Yep. That's absolutely right.

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constantly-confused In reply to AratoYui [2014-03-19 11:24:18 +0000 UTC]

Don't like me complaining? - Don't track me!

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GrotesqueDarling13 In reply to ??? [2014-03-19 08:01:48 +0000 UTC]

Seems really great, but oh its fuckin confusing. Lol.

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danlev In reply to GrotesqueDarling13 [2014-03-19 18:04:09 +0000 UTC]

It does take a little while to learn, but once you get a handle on it, it can be quite powerful!

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Cocoru In reply to ??? [2014-03-19 07:58:00 +0000 UTC]

What is the matter with you people?  Google isn't buying Deviantart, it's just widget.  No one's forcing you to use it.  Now calm DOWN.

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Duzloo In reply to ??? [2014-03-19 07:48:22 +0000 UTC]

>.<

Do not want.




Another reason to stay regular member.

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04StartyCornRainbow8 In reply to ??? [2014-03-19 07:37:30 +0000 UTC]

That reminds me of YouTube.

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Etsuko-Hime In reply to ??? [2014-03-19 07:37:30 +0000 UTC]

I hope they dont tell exactly where you live >.<

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easyfloat In reply to ??? [2014-03-19 07:26:52 +0000 UTC]

This community has lost a lot of best members. They just left because flood of bad stuff in a big pile.

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easyfloat In reply to ??? [2014-03-19 07:24:55 +0000 UTC]

Well this is bullshit. Artist don't need it if he is good as an artist.
Wy you bother people with constant advertising of premium membership, deviant art makes enough money already.
Ok Facebook rising to top in 2008-9. pullet down traffic from deviant art. But you should be free of charge. And make more effort in copyright, better advertise print services, etc.
Change this military green color, and maybe reorganize all portal of deviant art. Devinatart was better with stock and all stuff together from 2002 till 2008. Those were years when deviant meant sumthing.
I see this web space is dying, and it lives just because people aside go to download sum skins and wallpapers.

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MartenFerret In reply to easyfloat [2014-03-19 07:50:09 +0000 UTC]

Do you think YOU make enough money?

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SilvertoothTiger In reply to ??? [2014-03-19 07:18:14 +0000 UTC]

Who ever doesn't like this join us!
googlekillers.deviantart.com

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formatela In reply to SilvertoothTiger [2014-03-21 23:19:05 +0000 UTC]

No thanks.

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Mickxbeth2012 In reply to ??? [2014-03-19 07:14:46 +0000 UTC]

nothing for people who don't have a premium account huh?.....

I see how it is

Deviants without premium accounts are always overlooked!

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SilvertoothTiger In reply to Mickxbeth2012 [2014-03-19 07:17:58 +0000 UTC]

Join us.
googlekillers.deviantart.com

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MaraxxusEredexa In reply to ??? [2014-03-19 07:11:51 +0000 UTC]

Oh great, now even DeviantArt is subject to the watchful eye of Google.

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SilvertoothTiger In reply to MaraxxusEredexa [2014-03-19 07:18:39 +0000 UTC]

Join us. I know how you feel.

googlekillers.deviantart.com

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davincipoppalag In reply to ??? [2014-03-19 07:10:44 +0000 UTC]

crikey.. who has time for the art itself with all that analysis.. ...lol..  

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Necron56 In reply to ??? [2014-03-19 07:10:12 +0000 UTC]

Premium only is bullshit, try joining every other portfolio site in existence and free this shit up for everyone.

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OurHands In reply to ??? [2014-03-19 07:03:38 +0000 UTC]

That's pretty cool. But I haz no money. Ahahahahaha.....ha.

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Anako-ART In reply to ??? [2014-03-19 06:53:47 +0000 UTC]

Oh my God, I'm really shocked by how people are overreacting, as if already most of the internet (if not all) wasn't tracked by google. Why weren't they panicking when Twitter widget showed up? =.=

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Achico-Xion In reply to Anako-ART [2014-03-19 07:04:27 +0000 UTC]

I agree with you. This add-on may be useful or not, but I can't understand this histeria about Google taking control over DA. ...sorry, what? It.is.just.a.feature.

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Anako-ART In reply to Achico-Xion [2014-03-19 07:14:30 +0000 UTC]

Google have collected our information for years and while it is indeed dangerous, people don't understand that one more website won't change anything - because they have already been tracked by thousands of others. >.>

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fedde In reply to ??? [2014-03-19 06:34:10 +0000 UTC]

Cool feature I'll avoid since I'm afraid of the one possible day I reach the "pay google a fee" for hitting the roof in free no. of hits.

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formatela In reply to fedde [2014-03-21 23:21:05 +0000 UTC]

It's in the millions. You won't reach it. If you did. DA's servers would catch fire.

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PROtypeM3X In reply to ??? [2014-03-19 06:33:27 +0000 UTC]

oh boy stats!!! now i can keep track of my damage output and HP.

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darkanddefiant In reply to ??? [2014-03-19 06:24:26 +0000 UTC]

ffffffff i didn't like it when tumblr started this stuff, and i sure as hell don't like it here.

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Achico-Xion In reply to darkanddefiant [2014-03-19 06:56:23 +0000 UTC]

As anako-art said no one forces you to use it

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Anako-ART In reply to darkanddefiant [2014-03-19 06:45:56 +0000 UTC]

Why? It's not obligatory and it doesn't change anything.

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m-un In reply to ??? [2014-03-19 06:23:10 +0000 UTC]

O_O I rlly idk ;;

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MoonyMina In reply to ??? [2014-03-19 06:16:21 +0000 UTC]

looks cool ... I'm gonna give it a try

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SylvieTG In reply to ??? [2014-03-19 06:15:54 +0000 UTC]

Google is collecting the following information:
* IP Address
* Browser Make / Model
* Operating System
* Plug In fingerprint where supported (primarily Firefox and Chrome)
* CSS probe where supported (primarily old IE, old Firefox and old Chrome -- modern browsers no longer allow CSS probing)
* Google Cookie
* Potentially Android ID
* Potentially Toolbar ID
* Potentially Chrome ID

They are storing this personally identifiable information in a database that they then query to provide the page view numbers.  You can watch this process using Microsoft Fiddler or another standard debugging proxy.  You can watch the data I just listed being sent to Google.

Google stores this information in a table and then queries it to provide aggregate views of the information.

But Google retains the personally identifiable information.  Look at the graph -- you cannot generate the graph without it.

Google, in their privacy policy, says they can take this sort of data and share it with whoever they want, whenever they want, via whatever means they want, at any time that they want.  And its unclear to me if the privacy policy even would apply in this case, since the user is not necessarily a Google user.  (and therefore never entered into any agreement with Google about anything)

I really wish deviantART would use one of the many free, open source analytics packages instead of Google's. That way, the personally identifiable information would not leave deviantART controlled territory.

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formatela In reply to SylvieTG [2014-03-21 23:22:18 +0000 UTC]

DA has been using this service for years. It isn't new. What's new is that it has now been offered to some of DA's members.

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HeraldOfFire In reply to SylvieTG [2014-03-19 07:04:34 +0000 UTC]

Most of that is not personally identifiable information. For a start, any computer you interact with on the internet needs your IP address to talk to you, and your IP can be used to track location in an instant. There are means and ways of masking your IP address, of course, such as using proxys.

The rest is just basic system stuff which is utterly meaningless. They do not share your address or name which would genuinely be 'personally identifiable', just very basic statistics which, at the very worst, identifies which PC it originated from.

There's a lot of scaremongering around for no good reason, often perpetuated by misconceptions about what this data actually represents. Virtually every website you visit collects a data footprint so that it can recognize users when they return. Whether that's simply data for logging in or more complex information, such as banking websites, they need this information. Without it, the internet would not be an interactive experience, just a one-sided encyclopedia.

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Naesthiel In reply to HeraldOfFire [2014-03-21 07:20:00 +0000 UTC]

The big difference here is the free will. If I sign into my bank- oder deviantArt-account I'm fully aware that I share information with them, that's what I want in that case.

Also, the problem is not the tracking of one site, it's the cookie-tracking so Site_A knows you visited Site_B and Site_C afterwards. That way they can create pretty "neat" profiles of individual users and that's where my actual privacy concerns lie.

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HeraldOfFire In reply to Naesthiel [2014-03-21 07:28:40 +0000 UTC]

Unless you block half the internet, it would be near impossible to avoid digital profiling. Most websites store cookies, and link in countless other sites who store their own. Most of this profiling is benign, used to target advertising to users who are more receptive. From my perspective, I'd rather see advertisements on things I actually care about than a thousand links to weight loss sites.

I'm not trying to admonish Google here; they have plenty of policies I disagree with and some I outright despise. Just that there are far too many people scaremongering others into believing that their entire life history is somehow going to be spewed onto the internet by adding this. 

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Naesthiel In reply to HeraldOfFire [2014-03-21 08:20:47 +0000 UTC]

Au contraire, it's pretty easy. Whitelists ftw
NoScript (or even Ghostery) and APB and you are pretty good to go, for a beginning.

These sites are simply not allowed to store cookies, because my browser is set to accept only cookies of the site I actually visit, no third-party ones

Also I have no problem with Analytics per se, I'd just prefer something like Piwik , which is open source.

I simply don't allow google analytics, so it won't work for me.

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SylvieTG In reply to HeraldOfFire [2014-03-21 04:14:03 +0000 UTC]

Here's my simple counter argument.

Google recently sent out an announcement about how images in Gmail are now safer.  Previously, if you viewed a link to an image in Gmail, it linked directly to a third party website and drew the image inline.  Now, instead, in order to "protect your privacy," Google now proxies the images in those cases instead of serving direct links.  This protects the same, identified by Google, personally identifiable information that I cited in my reply.  Google says it is personally identifiable information when it is going from an email you have clicked on Google, to any website that is not Google.

An additional counter argument is that Internet Explorer by default blocks said cookie.  In order to get around that, Google serves an invalid privacy policy.  Under the W3 spec that Internet Explorer and some versions of Firefox follow, that triggers -- according to the requirements of the specification -- the browser to use the least restrictive cookie policy.  So while Internet Explorer would normally block the cookie, because it breaks privacy policy -- Google intentionally lies in their machine readable copy.

Internet Explorer 11 has a checkbox now -- I call it the "Take that Google" box -- but it says if the machine readable policy is not, in fact, machine readable that the cookie should be rejected.  Microsoft did a nice blog post on it, where they covered it in a lot more detail.

Anyway...

Google goes one farther than simply having an invalid machine readable policy.  You see, that is not sufficiently evil -- because that just makes IE take the cookie when the users got it set not to.

So they serve a link to a document...
And that document says, paraphrasing:
"Google owns your soul.  We're monitoring every page you click on the Internet and if you don't like it, you can attempt to sign out of every Google property individually.  If you miss even one sign out, we're allowed to continue to monitor you until you figure out which of our million sites you failed to log out of.  The large log out button, that looks like it logs out of all the sites, actually doesn't (ha! you thought we were making it easy on you?), and so you have to make sure that you have logged out of every site that might even tangently be associated with us either now, or at any time in the past, or at any future time.  If you sign out of everything, and then later sign in to any of our properties -- then we'll add all this data anyway and so having signed out first will have done you no good at all.  Good luck on that whole clearing the browser cache thing, too -- because we got that covered in the new HTML spec as we plowed over all the people who objected to the feature we're using and crammed it down the other browser's throats.  Have a nice day and remember, do no evil (if any EU regulator is watching -- otherwise evil is fine)."

I don't want to get super technical here -- but if you want me to, I can go on about how you can properly obfuscate the IP address.

NIST categorizes the IP address as personally identifiable information, and considers it to be similar to a phone number.  If you post someone's phone number, publicly, without their consent -- the same harm can come if you post someone's IP address.  There's the potential a hacker could do nasty stuff to them, or could use that information to work deeper.  Especially with the number of never-patched, ISP maintained routers out there running down level versions of Linux with well documented security flaws, that are serving as basically the only protection from the public Internet for most users.

Also...  Mozilla Foundation did a study where they found mobile battery life for Firefox OS was tripled by blocking only third party requests (that is -- navigating to these sites was fine if you went there directly) to Facebook, Twitter and Google.  They also found page loads were measurably faster, load to display was faster, and data consumption -- something almost all users are billed by the byte for these days on mobile -- dropped by over 60%.

The analytic hits are completely unnecessary -- they provide the user viewing the page with no information at all, and are all about the site operator and Google ad network.

On top of that, once geo-IP has been completed there is no reason at all to retain the IP address -- a hash against HMAC-SHA256, for example, is just as useful for computing the metrics.  Similarly, you don't need to send Google's unique ID (which is consistent across all websites), all they need is a PPID.

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HeraldOfFire In reply to SylvieTG [2014-03-21 07:21:48 +0000 UTC]

You still haven't refuted the fact that all this information can do is pick out which computer sent the request. A point which, I might add, can also be claimed by a dozen other websites. And yes, there are plenty of ways to mask IP address not restricted to proxys, it was simply an example. Furthermore, countless websites you visit will retain a list of IP's who recently visited the site for their own demographics. These lists can also be accessed by most law enforcement to track criminal activity.

As for copying images instead of directly embedding them, I'm not sure what the issue is. Back in ye olde times of Microsoft Outlook's preview window, people have looked for ways to directly access user information via web emails. Several of these methods took advantage of that window to run scripts on the host machine since it would treat the email as its own web page. Google's effective sandboxing prevents that. Whether the original or a copy, you're still getting the same basic information, and no information is leaving your machine to do so.

The focus of my argument is not whether Google is a money-grabbing sell-out (that's pretty much a given) but that the information used by these analytics is not the end of the privacy world. 

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rotane In reply to HeraldOfFire [2014-03-19 11:44:01 +0000 UTC]

Thanks for injecting a bit of common sense into this comments section.

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Anako-ART In reply to SylvieTG [2014-03-19 06:47:17 +0000 UTC]

Hopefully you're aware that most websites collect this kind of data Not mentioning the banks, they know more about you than google.

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Naesthiel In reply to Anako-ART [2014-03-21 07:22:16 +0000 UTC]

That's why I block it on every website that doesn't need to identify myself.

The real problem I see here, is the tracking over the "borders" of their own website. Why does Site_A need to know that 10 minutes after I visited them I visited Site_B?

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Anako-ART In reply to Naesthiel [2014-03-21 07:55:28 +0000 UTC]

To focus their ads better. To tell the banks about your possible credit needs. This is very complex, but there are tons of reasons. I'm not syaing it's good - I'm just saying how it looks. I don't like the way it works myself, but I'll be happy to observe how many people visit my page and which deviations they currently like the most.

Note that analytics doesn't show you user's personalities. It doesn't differentiate one user from another, so no one on dA will know that it was you who visited their page.

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Naesthiel In reply to Anako-ART [2014-03-21 08:17:58 +0000 UTC]

There are reasons for THEM, yes, but not for me.
Credits work a bit different here, than, for example, in the US, so that's not really a valid reason here (apart from the fact that I'm a very canny person *g*)

I'd still hugely prefer an open source alternative such as Piwik

To say it with very wise words: "Don't trust anything which has a brain unless you can see it"

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SylvieTG In reply to Anako-ART [2014-03-21 04:58:59 +0000 UTC]

Sure -- and if everyone else is stabbing themselves in the eye, should I join in on that too?

Sony didn't think patching their servers was very important, either -- are they really who you want to be modeling your privacy and security after?

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Anako-ART In reply to SylvieTG [2014-03-21 06:28:25 +0000 UTC]

You're overinterpreting my words way too far. I just stated the facts, not my opinion about them.

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