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There's a difference between user activity tracking (the context of the discussion you linked) and generic metric gathering, which is clearly a thing given that

There's a difference between user activity tracking (the context of the discussion you linked) and generic metric gathering, which is clearly a thing given that the post was a link to the public fonts analytics page. (I work at Google, I know nothing specific about fonts)

arthurcolle 7y ago
Totally understand and agree that there is a difference: I just half-remembered an at-least tangentially related post and wanted to call it out in case others didn't catch it in the last couple days. I think some actually conflate the generic vs. user-specific metrics collection quite frequently in arguments that I see on this site and I agree that it's definitely not the same but I still felt it was worth the call-out.
SahAssar 7y ago
I agree, but it's a problem because a big part of googles business relies on the former, so I can't trust them when they say that one of their products only does the latter.
- joshuamorton 7y ago
  Why not? A growing part of Google's business relies on b2b transactions. Are you also concerned that you're going to suddenly have to subscribe to search?
  - SahAssar 7y ago
    > Why not? I thought that was pretty clear in my previous comment, what part was unclear? > A growing part of Google's business relies on b2b transactions. Are you also concerned that you're going to suddenly have to subscribe to search? No, because search is profitable and already explicitly data-milked for most of it's worth. I'm concerned about the data collected in unprofitable services just because they are not profitable and claim to not have every iota of data extracted from them. So I'm concerned that Google Fonts, ajax.googleapis.com and so on will start to be milked for data just like search is.
    - joshuamorton 7y ago
      Why are you so confident that these services are unprofitable? You're already assuming the main profit source would be second order effects (analytics value add). Why not go further and assume that there already are second order effects that make fonts profitable. For example, more internet users means more profit for Google, and accessible cross language fonts lead to more web users.

arthurcolle 7y ago

Totally understand and agree that there is a difference: I just half-remembered an at-least tangentially related post and wanted to call it out in case others didn't catch it in the last couple days. I think some actually conflate the generic vs. user-specific metrics collection quite frequently in arguments that I see on this site and I agree that it's definitely not the same but I still felt it was worth the call-out.

SahAssar 7y ago

I agree, but it's a problem because a big part of googles business relies on the former, so I can't trust them when they say that one of their products only does the latter.

joshuamorton 7y ago
Why not? A growing part of Google's business relies on b2b transactions. Are you also concerned that you're going to suddenly have to subscribe to search?
- SahAssar 7y ago
  > Why not? I thought that was pretty clear in my previous comment, what part was unclear? > A growing part of Google's business relies on b2b transactions. Are you also concerned that you're going to suddenly have to subscribe to search? No, because search is profitable and already explicitly data-milked for most of it's worth. I'm concerned about the data collected in unprofitable services just because they are not profitable and claim to not have every iota of data extracted from them. So I'm concerned that Google Fonts, ajax.googleapis.com and so on will start to be milked for data just like search is.
  - joshuamorton 7y ago
    Why are you so confident that these services are unprofitable? You're already assuming the main profit source would be second order effects (analytics value add). Why not go further and assume that there already are second order effects that make fonts profitable. For example, more internet users means more profit for Google, and accessible cross language fonts lead to more web users.