This feels like the same argument:

"Al Gore claims he's an environmentalist, yet he flies using his personal gas guzzling plane."

And yeah, it's an ad hominem. "Is a fallacious argumentative strategy whereby genuine discussion of the topic at hand is avoided by instead attacking the character, motive, or other attribute of the person making the argument"

You can most definitely use centralized servers to disseminate decentralization. I'm pretty sure https://ipfs.io started as a github project and on a monolithic server backed by cloudflare. That doesn't dismiss them in the least - considering they now heavily dogfood.

More specifically a Tu quoque / appeal to hypocrisy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque :-)

Thanks for sharing this! I wasn't aware of this term and it's very relevant to another topic I often discuss. It'll be very useful to me. :}

How does running analytics on my site impair my ability to talk about what Tim Berners-Lee wants to do for freedom and control? ;-)

Yes, I track how popular what content is on my site. Motivates me to write more. Please feel free to block trackers; I do that as well.

Have you considered Piwik or a similar self hosted analytics solution?

I don't care if people run Analytics, its just when they go sharing all that data with a third party that it gets troubling.

Yes, I urgently need to migrate; same with Disqus, needs to become Solid.

PS. It is called Matomo now and at https://matomo.org

It undermines your argument, is what it does.

You can talk about it all you want, but as long as you continue to participate in the very thing you rail against, you're going to struggle to be taken seriously.

People who participate in something are often best positioned to criticise it, because they:

A) know how the sausage is made, and

B) stand to actually lose something if people believe them, i.e. they are standing by their point in spite of the negative consequences to themselves.

People on the dole who argue against (details / implementation of) social security should be taken seriously. Rich people arguing against tax breaks for the wealthy. Programmers against big tech firms. Etc.

So only murderers should judge other murderers?

Hmm.

technically the whole criminal judicial system is a licensed murderer

That's not at all how argumentation works :-)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18886753

'Actions speak louder than words.' ;-)

That's exactly how argumentation works...

You’re confusing argumentation with perception.

How is that not freedom? Each site owner has the freedom to use google analytics or not, no one forces them to. And each user has the ability to block requests to google analytics if they want, or avoid sites that use it.

How am I supposed to know that any particular domain is used for analytics, versus core functionality? How am I supposed to know what scripts a webpage loads, before viewing it?

> "But look, you found the notice, didn't you?" "Yes," said Arthur, "yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard.'"

I am curious to how this could be solved. I mean, i guess you could have your browser ask before every request generated for a page, but that seems very cumbersome.

apps do it on first install, why shouldn't browsers do it on a website's first launch?

> why shouldn't browsers do it on a website's first launch?

Because users would riot, and would use browsers or plugins that suppressed these notifications.

I would love it, personally! And websites would riot, and then reduce the number of permissions they requested, just like apps do/did.

It would be just like the cookie notices are, now that the data misuse is displayed with a banner, people rage and hate those. Websites haven't really removed third party/non-essential cookies.

And Disqus comments, which are also pretty surveillance spammy.

It's like Lenin said: “The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.”