Interview with Ian Thomas

After the presentation on Friday Robin Wauters interviewed Ian Thomas about Microsoft Analytics.

The interview can be read here:

One of the new features of Microsoft Analytics will be the incorperation of demographic data through Microsoft LiveID system. Weather this will have concequences for privacy was answered by Ian whith:

“Believe it or not, but Microsoft and myself are very much aware of the privacy concerns, and we do everything in our power to act according all privacy regulations. The data we collect, although linked to a Windows Live account, is related to an anonymous ID and remains anonymous at all times. We can’t, and won’t extract any identifiable data from the samples we use for socio-demographic data mining; rest assured that we take this very seriously. We don’t want to follow other providers when it comes to privacy, we want to lead the way.”

Also as Microsoft has learned from previous mistakes made by Googles Analytics they will probably increase user numbers slowly to not overrun the system. Make sure you sign up for the Beta now to be one of the first.

Ian says:

“We’ve been collecting e-mail addresses from early adopters who want to test-drive the beta release on our project website for some time now. I can’t give you an exact timing, but we will be sending out the first beta invitations before the end of this month. We need to be careful and ramp up the sign-ups in a measured way, so we can take our time to test the software’s performance and scalability, and test the support.”