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Mozilla's page talking about privacy has Google analytics enabled

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

#81

Post by vdaniuk »

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…

Sure, I'd love to elaborate on benefits for Mozilla and others that arise from use of GA. The list won't be exhaustive but will provide enough examples.

1. Mozilla launches a new translation initiative for Firefox that is announced on the index page and links to the landing page for the initiative. Google Analytics(GA) allows them to understand the clickthrough rate of the announcement and conversion rate of visitors joining the initiative for all combinations of channels/geographies/mediums and optimizing them.

Benefit: Firefox users get better localization as more people join.

2. Mozilla Development Network(MDN, good) competes with W3Schools(bad) for top results in search engines for JS/HTML/CSS related queries. GA has great tools for analysis for search engine traffic and integration with Google Webmaster Tools(GWT) that provides data for MDN team to do better SEO.

Benefit: MDN team increases traffic to their high-quality educational information and attracts attention of more users, strengthening Mozilla and Firefox brand.

3. Mozilla wants to teach web technologies to people and promote collaborations with Webmaker. Webmaker team can use Google Analytics custom events tool to collect and monitor specific users actions in the product. That provides data for optimization of onboarding experience for new users. For example, after upgrading UX/UI 50% more users will remix and publish a Webmake.

Benefit: more users successfully learn web technologies and create web content for fun/profit.

4. Mozilla gets a significant amount of revenue from search engine deals. Every install of a browser directly translates in small, but measurable increase of funding for Mozilla's projects. Google Analytics content experiments is a great tool for A/B and multivariate testing for increasing conversions on their Firefox download pages.

Benefit: Increase in browser installs, therefore increase in revenue, therefore increase of cool projects done by Mozilla.

Really, this is just a tiny number of possible use cases of Google Analytics by Mozilla. The efficiency boost by using an advanced web analytics software is immense and there is no open source alternative.

It's not Kerbal Space Program advanced level of analytics-foo, this is basic day-to-day stuff for growth hackers/startup founders/marketers/bloggers.

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

#82

Post by miji »

one of the prime reasons gnu forked firefox for icecat was google safebrowsing , besides that i dont think firefox really doesnt give a shit about your privacy and shit like that . their primary concern is to ship software , not code quality or issues of relevance to users .if the illusion can be maintained that it does care about your privacy then it works fine for them , it works fine for their major "donors".

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

#83

Post by vdaniuk »

Osmose wrote: post #77
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…

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'…

I trust Mozilla and fully support this pragmatic approach. The only alternative is total domination of for-profit megacorps who have diminishingly small concern for public benefit.

Thank you for your contribution to the free/open web.

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

#84

Post by shock »

gorhill wrote: post #50
sp332 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RequestPolicy and other tools like HTTPS Switchboard or even Ghostery let you block all content from certain domains, not just JS. They won't even load a tracking pixel. RP is whitelist-based and it can take some time to enable all the domains you actually use. Ghostery is blacklist-based and targets known tracking domains.

> other tools like HTTPS Switchboard I will take this opportunity to remind people that uMatrix is now available for Firefox (works on Nightly): https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/umatrix/

Thanks a lot for porting uMatrix to Firefox. I've been waiting for this since the first time I used HTTPSwitchboard for Chrome!

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

#85

Post by bigbugbag »

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…

1. independent as in funded almost entirely by google and ads (ads implying a form of surveillance hence privacy issues).

2. Well that's a bold statement to make to say that web analytics have to be third party to provide valuable actionable insights.

3. I don't care about operational efficiency, I care about my privacy. If mozilla sacrifices privacy for operational efficiency, well they do sacrifice privacy.

4. WTF are you talking about,visiting a mozilla webpage that doesn't give away analytics data to a third party gives better privacy than visiting a mozilla webpage that does. This is true whatever the rest of the world does. Besides mozilla has no reach on that billion of websites.

I tend to differ, the track record does not exactly point toward shipping great software, nor protecting the interest of individuals. As shown by bugs marked as won't solve and inclusion of controversial features while removing other.

So yup, you are missing the point because you seem blinded by your own vision.

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

#86

Post by Silhouette »

vdaniuk wrote: post #65
Silhouette wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tools like AWStats might not be up to the job, but there are other tools that do offer these kinds of features without sending data to Google. There's no need to roll your own just to do decent analytics without using Google Analytics.

Care to back up your claims with some links?

The most obvious alternative is probably Piwik[1], which offers similar basic functionality to regular Google Analytics out of the box, but is also Open Source and highly customisable/extensible via a plugin model.

Among the features threeseed mentioned, funnel visualisation is probably the weakest area in the baseline version right now. There have been various plug-ins available to do it for a long time, but it's not built-in yet. That said, this area is underpowered in GA as well, and at least with Piwik you can do something about it (and people actually do).

Piwik has been in development for nearly a decade, has been downloaded millions of times, and is in active use by high-profile, high-volume sites. It's every bit as production-ready as Google Analytics.

[1] http://piwik.org/

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

#87

Post by Silhouette »

SSLy wrote: post #71
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.

uMatrix has been recently released for FF. Basically, it's a better RP https://github.com/gorhill/uMatrix

That looks similar to existing plug-ins like Policeman. These are great for technically-minded power users who understand the implications, but IMHO they far too complicated for "normal" users who just want a bit of added privacy and security without spending half their lives tweaking configurations.

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

#88

Post by vdaniuk »

bigbugbag wrote: post #85
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…

1. independent as in funded almost entirely by google and ads (ads implying a form of surveillance hence privacy issues). 2. Well that's a bold statement to make to say that web analytics have to be third party to provide valuable actionable insights. 3. I don't care about operational efficiency, I care about my privacy. If mozilla sacrifices privacy for operational efficiency, well they do sacrifice privacy. 4. WTF…

>So yup, you are missing the point because you seem blinded by your own vision.

I am ok with my views being challenged but remain unconvinced by your arguments.

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

#89

Post by vdaniuk »

Silhouette wrote: post #86
vdaniuk wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Care to back up your claims with some links?

The most obvious alternative is probably Piwik[1], which offers similar basic functionality to regular Google Analytics out of the box, but is also Open Source and highly customisable/extensible via a plugin model. Among the features threeseed mentioned, funnel visualisation is probably the weakest area in the baseline version right now. There have been various plug-ins available to do it for a long time, but it's no…

Piwik is fine open-source software, I won't argue with that.

However, it isn't really comparable in advanced features with GA:

* advanced funnel analysis, such as multi-channel funnels

* attribution models and analysis

* advanced visualization and analysis tools

* age/gender demographic and interest reports

* custom dimension and custom metrics

* mobile android/iphone SDK for apps

and many other features including content experiments, webmaster tools integration, social data hub(though this one is mostly useless) etc.

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

#90

Post by cbd1984 »

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…

> Mozilla is one of the good, independent orgs

So they say, but their actions, here, put them in with Google.

> If they remove third-party analytics from their web properties, Mozilla instantly loses valuable actionable insights that significantly increase their efficiency as an organization.

I disagree, and I fail to see what Mozilla needs from analytics badly enough to require them to partner with Google in such a privacy-robbing fashion.

> If Mozilla loses operational efficiency, Google/Microsoft becomes more powerful and are able to obtain more users for Chrome/IE. They use all analytics they need.

So Mozilla should feed Google more data?

> No meaningful privacy increase for users is achieved, Google Analytics is now installed on (billions - 1) websites.

You just said Google and Mozilla were in competition. Make up your mind.

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