The original intent of the D-LID project, the Design Lab for Interpreted Data, was to generate facts about the way different people interpreted digital analytics data. It was to be a website with a few treatments of the same dataset. Participants would be watched to see which treatments they found useful. With some help from Bayes, we’d put some hard core facts on the table about data design in the context of different audiences. We’d make the data available to members of the DAA for a year, and then open it up to the public thereafter. After it was all scoped out, the median estimated price tag was too much. In talking to partners, we got that figure down to[…]

The European Special Interest Group (SIGEU) of the Digital Analytics Association put out a whitepaper on privacy compliance in December. You can get a copy of it here. It’s an excellent paper. It not only summarizes cookie laws in the EU, but also contains evidence of tracking collapse and the consequences of the interruption caused by the opt-in provision. This is particularly important. The HTTP Cookie was invented in 1994. Its original purpose was the measure the proportion of browsers that were first time visitors to a site. It spawned thousands of new inventions. Because that’s what technologists do. That’s what humans do. We use tools and invent new uses for them. So it went with the cookie. Look at[…]