Balancing Privacy and Metrics

Even without the imperatives of advertising, any system intended for news distribution needs to support basic metrics. In this, You Are Here faced another design hurdle common to privacy-enhancing systems: how to effectively monitor users’ engagement with the system without monitoring the users themselves.

“I always knew that we’d somehow have to track people who were using the app, and obviously I’m not interested in tracking individuals,” says Grant. “Still, to understand how the device is being used in order to improve it, or just understand how people use something like this, we want to have some kind of analytics/tracking in place.”

Eventually, Grant settled on using the open-source Piwik tracking platform, which provided a good balance of information and anonymity. You Are Here can log information like “the device that’s connected, what kind of browser they’re on, screen resolution, how long it took for the page to load, the date and time, what they were clicking on,” says Grant. Although relying on Piwik made recording some information—such as how long a user listened to an audio track—more difficult, the fact that it was simple and lightweight was worth the additional effort. While tracking packages like Google Analytics require sending information to Google’s servers, Piwik was small enough to both live and store data right on the Raspberry Pi.

“That was also cool,” says Grant, “that we were using something that just lives on the front end and doesn’t send any information to some remote server.” Although the data was securely accessible via a remote login, without this, checking the user statistics would mean visiting the device in person.