On Tue, Mar 27, 2012 at 01:55:37PM -0400, Joey Hess wrote:
> > DDG will earmark traffic originating for Debian, for browsers who want
> > to do so, by using the search URL
> > https://duckduckgo.com/?q={{search}}&t=debian
>
> The privacy implications of this need to be considered. At least for
> Chromium there is no indication in the user agent that the user is
> using Debian.
Thanks for pointing this out. Let's consider them then.
If we want to go ahead with this, the only way is tagging Debian
originated searches as such, because it is by counting them that DDG
will decide the amount of the "donation".
There are around already quite some statistics on the net that counts
the traffic that originates "from various distributions". A well known
example are the Wikimedia statistics [1]. They claim to do that on the
basis of the User-Agent string, so their definition of "Linux Debian" is
probably equivalent to "Iceweasel".
[1] http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikimedia/squids/SquidReportOperatingSystems.htm
Using "&t=iceweasel" is actually what the DDG person who approached us
initially proposed. It is me and Mike who suggested to rather go for
"&t=debian". The reason is that the value of the "&t" parameter is to be
written down in the agreement. Choosing "&t=debian" would allow other
browser to pick the same query string --- again, if the respective
maintainers want to --- without having to change the agreement.
The choice of whether searches are recognizable as coming from Debian or
not is in maintainer's hands, as it already is, independently of whether
we accept DDG "donations" or not.
Personally, I expect browser maintainers to have already arguments to
decide whether they want traffic to be recognizable as originating from
Debian or not. All we'll be saying is that, for maintainers who don't
have a problem with earmarking traffic as originating from Debian, *they
will have an option* to gather Debian "donations" out of DDG searches.
Cheers.
--
Stefano Zacchiroli zack@{upsilon.cc,pps.jussieu.fr,debian.org} . o .
Maître de conférences ...... http://upsilon.cc/zack ...... . . o
Debian Project Leader ....... @zack on identi.ca ....... o o o
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