is all user tracking legal?

[AffiliateDreamer]

Hi,

If I am tracking what users click on which ad, and what time and their i.p address etc. is that legal?

I've heard that sometimes it can be illegal, where is the 'official' word on this? and does it vary country per country?

[cgrantski]

No not all user tracking is legal. And a lot depends on your privacy policy being in sync with what you do. Are you looking at individual users or IPs (not lists of IPs, which is in most stats packages, but the whole visit or the history of one IP or IP block)? Or are you looking only at aggregated numbers? If you look at individual IPs, why and what do you do with it?

[pmkpmk]

It is different from country to country. Some have stricter privacy rights, others have not. It's not only the data you log, it's also the relation to other data you have.

In my country, I am allowed to track all movements, but only in an anonymized way. As soon as I put it into a relation to existing customer data, it would be against our privacy laws. I'm even required by law to only collect personal (non-anonymized) data which is absolutely necessary for a transaction. So if I offer subscription to a newsletter, I'm only allowed to ask for the email-address, but NOT for the name, because only the email-address is necessary for the transaction.

My advice is to learn about your countries laws in that aspect, and then compile a privacy policy which complies to it and which you put on your site.