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Mozilla's page talking about privacy has Google analytics enabled

shapeoftheweb.mozilla.org

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Re: Mozilla's page talking about privacy has Google analytics enabled

#71

Post by SSLy »

Silhouette wrote: post #45
Programmatic wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Check out RequestPolicy sometime if you're concerned about GA and other tracking and went through the trouble to bit bucket it in hosts; it's really nice to be able to set which other sites any given site can contact, and I trust it more than the other curated options like Ghostery etc. since I can see for myself where each site is allowed to go.

Unfortunately the Firefox 38 update broke RequestPolicy. There are other extensions that do a similar job, including a volunteer effort to continue the original extension, but right now none of them seems quite as neat and reliable as the original.

uMatrix has been recently released for FF. Basically, it's a better RP

https://github.com/gorhill/uMatrix

Re: Mozilla's page talking about privacy has Google analytics enabled

#72

Post by mattmanser »

vdaniuk wrote: post #64
cbd1984 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're missing the point so comprehensively I have to conclude it's deliberate.

Huh, am I? Has anyone offended by this "transgression" of privacy by Mozilla thought this through to its logical conclusion? Let's see. 1. Mozilla is one of the good, independent orgs that don't have profit as their main goal. They do fight for the interests of the community at large. 2. If they remove third-party analytics from their web properties, Mozilla instantly loses valuable actionable insights that significa…

I mean this is an honest way, but what actionable insights?

Mozilla aren't selling anything on that page. They won't be making key engineering decisions off of the page.

Could you detail the gains that they could make that makes the world a better place? That justify any sort of tracking over '300, 000 people viewed this page today' that you can get from your own logs?

There is some data that might be occasionally useful, like screen sizes, but only occasionally.

Re: Mozilla's page talking about privacy has Google analytics enabled

#73

Post by whichdan »

mattmanser wrote: post #72
vdaniuk wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh, am I? Has anyone offended by this "transgression" of privacy by Mozilla thought this through to its logical conclusion? Let's see. 1. Mozilla is one of the good, independent orgs that don't have profit as their main goal. They do fight for the interests of the community at large. 2. If they remove third-party analytics from their web properties, Mozilla instantly loses valuable actionable insights that significa…

I mean this is an honest way, but what actionable insights? Mozilla aren't selling anything on that page. They won't be making key engineering decisions off of the page. Could you detail the gains that they could make that makes the world a better place? That justify any sort of tracking over '300, 000 people viewed this page today' that you can get from your own logs? There is some data that might be occasionally us…

What about funnel analysis?

Re: Mozilla's page talking about privacy has Google analytics enabled

#74

Post by the8472 »

Programmatic wrote: post #68
Silhouette wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately the Firefox 38 update broke RequestPolicy. There are other extensions that do a similar job, including a volunteer effort to continue the original extension, but right now none of them seems quite as neat and reliable as the original.

Is RP not being maintained then? :/ It's one of the tools that makes me actually like FireFox.

there's a maintained fork: https://github.com/RequestPolicyContinued/requestpolicy

Re: Mozilla's page talking about privacy has Google analytics enabled

#75

Post by chimeracoder »

lawl wrote: post #60
taspeotis wrote: post #18

Mozilla have a Google Analytics Premium account and they try to minimize the information they share [1]. Our Google Analytics premium account is set to opt-out on all of 3rd party uses of the data and the only people who have access to the anonymous aggregated data is Mozilla Employees. This is not the normal Google Analytics setup that most people use on other websites. Also, to increase privacy we flipped the anony…

Or they could just setup Piwik[0] or something like that... [0] https://piwik.org/

> Or they could just setup Piwik or something like that...

They could, but honestly, it's questionable whether Piwik would even work for their use case & scale, and even if it does, it's debatable whether it would be the best use of their limited resources.

This situation makes for a really catchy headline, but the page is primarily talking about privacy in the context of government surveillance. In that context, Piwik is just as vulnerable to NSLs (active surveillance) or NSA snooping (passive surveillance) as Google Analytics is. There is a marginal harm to using Google Analytics instead of a self-hosted service, but it's quite possible that the benefits (of being able to reach more people and better educate people about those evils) outweighs those harms, especially given that the target audience for this site is already being tracked by Google on the vast majority of their web browsing anyway[0][1].

Furthermore, we could just use this as an opportunity to underscore the importance of the problem itself: it's a rather damning statement about the effectiveness and pervasiveness of digital tracking that Mozilla feels that Google is its best (or only) option[1] for educating as many people as possible about the evils of online surveillance.

[0] http://w3techs.com/technologies/details/ta-googleanalytics/a...

[1] This isn't even counting the other ways that Google tracks web users: Google's CDNs for JQuery and web fonts, people who use Google's DNS servers, etc.

[2] I'm making the assumption that someone at Mozilla has made this decision consciously, which is not an unreasonable assumption for this discussion - it's rather unlikely that the people building the website about digital surveillance and working at the company partnered with EFF and Tor are unaware that Google Analytics is digital surveillance.

Re: Mozilla's page talking about privacy has Google analytics enabled

#77

Post by Osmose »

vdaniuk wrote: post #64
cbd1984 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're missing the point so comprehensively I have to conclude it's deliberate.

Huh, am I? Has anyone offended by this "transgression" of privacy by Mozilla thought this through to its logical conclusion? Let's see. 1. Mozilla is one of the good, independent orgs that don't have profit as their main goal. They do fight for the interests of the community at large. 2. If they remove third-party analytics from their web properties, Mozilla instantly loses valuable actionable insights that significa…

As a Mozilla Web Developer who has worked on several of our websites, including this one, this is exactly the thought process behind this kind of choice.

It's the same thought process behind 90% of the things we do that people hate Mozilla for. People think Mozilla is pure and 100% ideal by whatever standards that they make up themselves, but the truth is that Mozilla is _pragmatic_. Sometimes we do things that aren't great because to do so otherwise would hurt the greater mission.

For example, we don't exist to create 100% open source software 100% of the time. Instead, we _strongly_ believe what we say in our manifesto: "Free and open source software promotes the development of the Internet as a public resource." Sometimes, mostly when we're working with a partner (like a phone company) who can offer us significant leverage, we write some code that isn't immediately made public, and _that's okay_. Our end goal isn't to put more open source software in the world, it's to further the internet as a global public resource.

(Mozilla is also so diverse and disjointed that sweeping generalizations like the ones I just made are completely inaccurate. We make mistakes and we make bad choices. Mozilla is more like several different companies that happen to share the same name.)

Re: Mozilla's page talking about privacy has Google analytics enabled

#78

Post by giovannibajo1 »

mattmanser wrote: post #72
vdaniuk wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh, am I? Has anyone offended by this "transgression" of privacy by Mozilla thought this through to its logical conclusion? Let's see. 1. Mozilla is one of the good, independent orgs that don't have profit as their main goal. They do fight for the interests of the community at large. 2. If they remove third-party analytics from their web properties, Mozilla instantly loses valuable actionable insights that significa…

I mean this is an honest way, but what actionable insights? Mozilla aren't selling anything on that page. They won't be making key engineering decisions off of the page. Could you detail the gains that they could make that makes the world a better place? That justify any sort of tracking over '300, 000 people viewed this page today' that you can get from your own logs? There is some data that might be occasionally us…

I would say that browser usage, demography (country distribution etc.) and navigation paths (bounce rate, funnels, etc.) within the site are all important data points to optimize a non-profit website. I'm not sure anybody can make a point for GA to be life changing for that site, but the opposite is also true (the saving in privacy from visitors is not going to have a game-changing effect).

I also think that a pragmatic organization should focus on a few very important battles that it thinks it can win, rather than trying to fight everything in the name of ideology.

Re: Mozilla's page talking about privacy has Google analytics enabled

#79

Post by Osmose »

mattmanser wrote: post #72
vdaniuk wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh, am I? Has anyone offended by this "transgression" of privacy by Mozilla thought this through to its logical conclusion? Let's see. 1. Mozilla is one of the good, independent orgs that don't have profit as their main goal. They do fight for the interests of the community at large. 2. If they remove third-party analytics from their web properties, Mozilla instantly loses valuable actionable insights that significa…

I mean this is an honest way, but what actionable insights? Mozilla aren't selling anything on that page. They won't be making key engineering decisions off of the page. Could you detail the gains that they could make that makes the world a better place? That justify any sort of tracking over '300, 000 people viewed this page today' that you can get from your own logs? There is some data that might be occasionally us…

Off the top of my head, based off things we normally look for in our analytics:

- See how people get to the privacy page from where they enter the site. Useful to see if some categories are getting more traffic than others, so that we can re-balance if, for example, we think that Privacy is not getting the attention we want it to.

- See how long people are staying on this page. What if the writing or infographic don't make sense to users? We can try and improve them so that users come away with a better understanding of privacy.

- How are users interacting with those circles? If they're not hovering over any of the circles, maybe we should make it auto-switch between them to draw the user's eye over. Or maybe if they're only hovering over the first three, we should make those first three the most important aspects of privacy to make sure they're seen.

The goal of Shape of the Web is (in my eyes) to educate users about the issues that the open internet faces today, and to help give them a framework for thinking about what the web is (it's hard to think about a thing if you don't know how it's "shaped"). All of these metrics help us improve the page's ability to convey information so we can better educate users.

Re: Mozilla's page talking about privacy has Google analytics enabled

#80

Post by the8472 »

Programmatic wrote: post #12
userbinator wrote: post #4

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.

Check out RequestPolicy sometime if you're concerned about GA and other tracking and went through the trouble to bit bucket it in hosts; it's really nice to be able to set which other sites any given site can contact, and I trust it more than the other curated options like Ghostery etc. since I can see for myself where each site is allowed to go.

Speaking of privacy extensions, I vaguely recall some addon that compartmentalizes cookie/local storage between tabs.

Say I open a youtube.com and it wants to load cross-origin content from google (and thus sends cookies to google) then it can use different cookies than those used when I browse google search directly.

But I can't find it anymore.

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