| In Reply Burklowand colleagues discuss third-party elements
and their use on government health information websites.1
Third-party elements include not only tracking elements,
but also nontracking elements that serve advertising,
provide site traffic analytics to the owner, or deliver page functionality.
Thus, “third-party elements” are not synonymous
with “tracking elements.”
Burklow and colleagues state that all 4 National Institutes
of Health (NIH) websites use tracking elements. All use
third-party elements. The main NIH site uses only nontracking
elements such as Google Analytics, unless the user navigates
away from nih.gov to, for example, cancer.gov.
The PubMed, Medline Plus, and National Cancer Institute
(NCI) sites use Omniture, WebTrends, and/or JSAPI Stats
Collection elements, which serve no purpose other than
tracking.2
These uses, as Iwrote, are fully disclosed in the sites’ privacy
policies and deidentification of data are stressed.My view
is that PubMed,Medline Plus, and NCI conform to the government
guidelines and that the objective is “optimizing the user
experience.” |