It's a valid objection. GA at this point is on most websites you visit. The data is forwarded to Google where it's processed and stored forever. GA is one of the biggest threats to privacy on the web, and any company claiming to care about your privacy should not be using it.

I agree with you that it's a valid objection. I disagree however, when you say " any company claiming to care about your privacy should not be using it." That's an easy accusation to throw around, but what is hard to is come up with a better alternative.

What is your suggestion, that they should abandon all analytics, or that they should build their own, or do you not have one? Are you willing to acknowledge that GA solves a real problem and provides valuable information?

In my judgement, it makes a lot of sense that Mozilla would use GA. I want them to use it because I believe in their mission, and I'm sure in the balance of things, it helps them maintain a stronger position as an organization.

>What is your suggestion, that they should abandon all analytics

Ideally, yes. Or at the very least don't use Google for it. Use something like Pwiki instead. Or perhaps try actually allowing your users to decide what if any information they feel comfortable sharing with you.

There are other non-profits like the Wikimedia Foundation and the Internet Archive whose websites still somehow manage to function despite not triggering any of the multitude of filter rules that plugins like uBlock ship with.

uBlock blocks Piwik, self-hosted or not.

Yep, and the easiest way to fix this is something like: @@||piwik-domain.tld^

One obvious and easy alternative to Google Analytics is Piwik. You host it yourself.

https://piwik.org/

I'm sorry, "we need analytics therefore it's fine to violate privacy" is not good reasoning!

But Mozilla doesn't appear to have done that. "We need analytics, and we respect privacy, so we've come up with something that's better than most companies but still not good enough for some of our users".

It's easy to bash someone for hypocrisy when they're trying trying to do the right thing. It's a bit weird seeing this consternation at Mozilla considering just how scummy the other companies are.

They are definitely helping, but I do wish there was wider awareness of the implications of G-A everywhere.

I find it very, very hard to get outraged over analytics code on a web browser site. And as previously mentioned every time someone brings up this idiotic factoid, Mozilla's use of GA isn't exactly standard.

You find it very, very hard to get outraged because you either use GA yourself and do not wish to acknowledge your complicity in the matter or you've simply failed to make the obvious leap from analytics to clickstream data.

Google wants to know what web pages you visit, when, and how often, and a GA beacon that phones home that information placed on every web page is the easiest way for them to do it.

EDIT: there are either a lot of angry GA users in this thread or Google apologists. Either was, I do believe Google is now or will soon use GA for clickstream tracking. I also believe this is why they offer to host frequently requested assets like JQuery.

> why they offer to host frequently requested assets like JQuery

Let's not forget the Google Fonts, which exist to "make web beautiful". How adorable and altruistic. Yay! /throws-confetti

Yes, let's not forget the fonts and js libraries served on cookie-less domains for speed. Surely, these are part of a plan to create a New World Order. https://developers.google.com/fonts/faq#Privacy

Cookies don't matter when browser fingerprinting accomplishes the same task. Read the page you linked to:

"We do log records of the CSS and the font file requests, and access to this data is on a need-to-know basis and kept secure."

Just like every other Google Privacy Policy, it's insultingly disingenuous, couched in terms of protecting your privacy while actually reserving for themselves the right to violate it by collecting enough information on you for you to be uniquely identified and storing that information indefinitely.

Okay, WTF? Name a web server out there that doesnt keep logs.

Your constant projecting of ulterior motives, absent any evidence, on a throwaway account, is the very definition of worthless, gratuitously negative content. The guy upthread is complaining that requests are cached for a day.

I'm sorry, would y'all prefer that they not be cached?

Google's motive is to make money, and they do that largely through advertising. There's nothing ulterior about the motive I'm suggesting. More information on you means they can charge a higher price for the privilege of advertising certain products or services to you. Of course, the fact that the same information they sell to advertisers is also easily accessible by the government with a mere subpoena, if even that, is of little concern to Google, Eric Schmidt, or remarkably even to many HN posters in this thread.

I'm sorry, can you present a plausible scenario in which the government (or any other entity for that matter) cares which web browser I download?

And as to this: it's insultingly disingenuous - no, it really isn't. Every piece of web server software in the world keeps logs. Would you prefer they lied?

You seem hell-bent on damning Google for not doing anything particularly evil in this case. And it doesn't look like you're willing to have your mind changed, either.

From your link.

> Requests for CSS assets are cached for 1 day

Tracking font request "only" once per day is still spying.

Also, regarding your jump from Google's attack on our privacy to a larger to that "New World Order" reference is highly offensive. You're building a straw-man that was not stated, and perpetuating the belief that someone who complains about their privacy being attack must be some sort of "conspiracy theory nutter".

There are no cookies. Claiming that Google is "tracking" users for some nefarious "attack on privacy" with these properties is "highly offensive" to my bullshit detector.

It is very well known that cookies are not the only way to track activity. You insistence that Google somehow doesn't do the trivial step of JOINing a few tables together with any of the many possible candidate keys that browsers leak is laughable. Even plain apache logs have the IP address, which is all the "cookie" they need for those of us that have static IP addresses. Even with DHCP, Google only needs to do an INNER JOIN style query to associate that IP with any of the other requests made in the same time period to their servers such as google-analytics.

And all that doesn't even begin to touch "panopticlick" style entropy gathering.

In case you are interested in learning what how Google works, instead only looking at the facade they show you, I suggest watching the presentation[1] Aral Balkan gave at the same event that hosted djb's recent talk (which is also recommended). You won't like it - possibly violently - but maybe you can learn a bit about how the world actually works..

[1] https://projectbullrun.org/surveillance/2015/video-2015.html...