Eric T. Peterson wrote an open call to President Elect Barack Obama today, asking the new Chief Technology Officer of the United States, when he or she is appointed, to push for use of First Party Cookies on most Governent sites.

In much the same way that President Obama has to give up his Blackberry upon taking office next month, due to privacy regulations that are difficult to update, so is the Federal Goverment inhibited from using data analytics for insight gathering.

But there are certainly arguments for allowing data collection for insight that does not violate privacy and, I believe, it’s doable.

In fact,this is an area where The Wen Analytics Association can help, by enforcing Peterson’s Open Call (we’re on it) AND creating frameworks and guidence documentation satisfying how data collected can be used while not invading privacy issues (and we need to do that, as well).

Why now, and not before?

Because, the new administration has a much more progressive agenda, is more open and technology savvy, and is likely to try moving forward on making web technology and tracking a way of listening to what citizens want.

And I feel, as web analysts, we could support this progressive agenda by providing firepower for it, via framework documents.

Just a thought on this Wednesday in November.

BTW, this post was created on my IPhone, no hyperlinks and limmited spell/grammer checking, but otherwise a great way to blog.