Mozilla's page talking about privacy has Google analytics enabled

This is completely inacceptable.

Preaching water and drinking wine, eh?

If they’d really want some kind of tracking, they could have used a locally installed system like piwik, as the largest issue with tracking comes when the data from many sites is combined.

I've had GA's domains redirected to 0.0.0.0 in HOSTS ever since I knew of them.

It's also another one of these single-page-apps that require JavaScript to display any content at all.

I think with such a design they're clearly not targeting the sort of privacy levels that more users on HN than the Internet in general expect.

Not only enabled, but in breach of the Google Analytics' Terms which state very clearly: "You must post a Privacy Policy and that Privacy Policy must provide notice of Your use of cookies that are used to collect data. You must disclose the use of Google Analytics, and how it collects and processes data. "

See section 7 "Privacy" here for the full text. http://www.google.com/analytics/terms/us.html

I see no privacy policy on the shapeoftheweb.mozilla.org site though you are correct that they do post that privacy policy on the completely different website www.mozilla.org.

I suppose they would argue that's the same but I don't think it is good enough (especially for a site preaching privacy values). It should be down in the footer, or even better they should be using Piwik and skipping GA completely.

To me, this feels like a website built by a pro-privacy team who had some marketing or PR person slap the GA code in there with no comprehension of irony at all.

EDIT: Also to note that mozilla.org uses UA-36116321-1 tracking and shapeoftheweb.mozilla.org uses UA-49796218-22, which indicates to me that they are aware that these are two distinctly different sites.

When you open a freshly installed Firefox on Ubuntu or Windows (that is where I checked) you will have a google cookie set right before the first usage, without any chance of opting out or being asked before.

Yes, anybody can change the startpage, delete all cookies and restart the browser. How many users will do this? And does forcing every user into google surveillance comply with this privacy marketing of mozilla, or is it just a zynical fake campaign?

There should be a startpage explaining what cookies are, describing the difference between temporary and permanent cookies and how these help to track your web usage, and provide one single, visible button to delete all cookies.

After this I should be asked if I would like to help mozilla funding by redirecting me to a google web search which will set a permanent cookie.