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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

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 anonymize flag in the Google Analytics request... [1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1122305#c8 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1122305#c8

aw3c2 11y ago
Good for them. They are still ratting out their visitors to Google.
- donohoe 11y ago
  Such melodrama. As we speak police vans are en route to round up visitors to that Mozilla page, in co-ordination with Google's security division...
  - Sir_Substance 11y ago
    Such strawman, very shill, wow. The information google gathers will never go away. If google collapses, that data will be slurped up by governments and the private sector alike, and there's absolutely no way for you to predict how it will be used in 40 years time. The optimum strategy is to never let them get an ounce of information about you.
    - threeseed 11y ago
      And how is it different if Mozilla were to run their own stack ? Or are you suggesting that they should do no analytics at all.
      - sp332 11y ago
        Data on Mozilla's servers can't be cross-referenced to add to the profiles of visitors and track them across the internet.
      - madez 11y ago
        The point is not to centrally agregate data in the first place because the synergetic effect is too big. Knowing 24/7 where you are is one thing, and knowing everything you search is another, but if you combine these two, it already becomes very scary. Google knows so much more. It is a wet dream of spying agencies. What can we do about it? I think most people don't understand technology enough to see what happens, so education might be the first step. I personally avoid Google.
      - Sir_Substance 11y ago
        If everyone on the internet created their own analytics stack, the data integration issues alone would prevent aggregation and abuse in 40 years time.
    - eternalban 11y ago
      You make excellent points. This problem needs to be addressed in the political space.
      - c0achmcguirk 11y ago
        Please no. I think the web community can solve problems faster and more efficiently than governments. Remember the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003? Did it solve our spam problem or did your email provider do it?
        eternalban 11y ago
        It is a matter of constitutional law and civil rights, not technology. > .. "web" .. This is an issue that is not merely limited to networks, much less simply "web".
      - Sir_Substance 11y ago
        I'm a big fan of the EU's "right to be forgotten". I never quite got how everyone decided that it was a tool for pedophiles. If it had been implemented in a robust way that required companies like google to remove all data about you, I'd be making an annual request, on general principals. Given unlimited political power, I'd probably boil it down to the trifecta of "collecting data about someone, even in anonymised form, constitutes opening an account for them. Accounts are always wholly owned by the person they are about. In the event of multiperson accounts each individual has controlling influence over the account's deletion (see rule three)", "when an account is created the owner or owners must be notified", "upon an account owners request, you must completely delete an account and all associated data, working in good faith to delete it as fast as possible, even if deleting that data will affect other accounts". It probably needs some refining, but the goal is to punish deliberately obfuscatory system designs where data or account information is deliberately entangled to make data deletion impractical, and give people control final control over the gathering of personal data about them. Ultimately, I really liked the Gevulot system from the quantum thief (really worth reading, it's an amazing series). It'd be nice to have an internet based version of the same system.
vog 11y ago
Why don't they simply analyze the log files on their own, without sharing that data with other companies? For example, running some log files offline through AWstats is not that hard, and the AWstats output is quite good for most purposes.
- vdaniuk 11y ago
  >AWstats is not that hard, and the AWstats output is quite good for most purposes. You haven't done any serious web analytics at scale, have you?
  - cbd1984 11y ago
    You're missing the point so comprehensively I have to conclude it's deliberate.
    - vdaniuk 11y ago
      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 significantly increase their efficiency as an organization. Creating a viable alternative to Google Analytics is practically impossible for Mozilla due to lack of resources. 3. 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. Less users for Mozilla means less income from search engine deals and less influence. 4. No meaningful privacy increase for users is achieved, Google Analytics is now installed on (billions - 1) websites. So. You want a non-profit with proven track record of shipping great software and protecting the interests of individuals to take a significant hit in the name of hard-line ideological principle that won't really benefit the users. I guess I am missing the point.
      - mattmanser 11y ago
nodiscpls 11y ago
What sort of analytics do Mozilla actually need?
- threeseed 11y ago
  I could explain it but it's better to look at the websites of MixPanel, Google Analytics and KissMetrics. Those are three leading players for analytics IMHO. Web analytics for most serious sites are managed by dedicated marketing teams so features are to meet their requirements.
  - cbd1984 11y ago
    So they don't actually need analytics at all, it's just marketing people trying to preserve their jobs.
cbd1984 11y ago
Or so they claim. Is there any way for anyone else to verify that?
- eli 11y ago
  That would be a really weird lie for no reason I can imagine.
  - cbd1984 11y ago
    The reason is to make it seem like they care about privacy more than they actually do. Obviously, people care how much they care, hence a reason to lie.
lawl 11y ago
Or they could just setup Piwik[0] or something like that... [0] https://piwik.org/ https://piwik.org/
- chimeracoder 11y ago
  > 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/all/all 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.

aw3c2 11y ago

Good for them. They are still ratting out their visitors to Google.

donohoe 11y ago
Such melodrama. As we speak police vans are en route to round up visitors to that Mozilla page, in co-ordination with Google's security division...
- Sir_Substance 11y ago
  Such strawman, very shill, wow. The information google gathers will never go away. If google collapses, that data will be slurped up by governments and the private sector alike, and there's absolutely no way for you to predict how it will be used in 40 years time. The optimum strategy is to never let them get an ounce of information about you.
  - threeseed 11y ago
    And how is it different if Mozilla were to run their own stack ? Or are you suggesting that they should do no analytics at all.
    - sp332 11y ago
      Data on Mozilla's servers can't be cross-referenced to add to the profiles of visitors and track them across the internet.
    - madez 11y ago
      The point is not to centrally agregate data in the first place because the synergetic effect is too big. Knowing 24/7 where you are is one thing, and knowing everything you search is another, but if you combine these two, it already becomes very scary. Google knows so much more. It is a wet dream of spying agencies. What can we do about it? I think most people don't understand technology enough to see what happens, so education might be the first step. I personally avoid Google.
    - Sir_Substance 11y ago
      If everyone on the internet created their own analytics stack, the data integration issues alone would prevent aggregation and abuse in 40 years time.
  - eternalban 11y ago
    You make excellent points. This problem needs to be addressed in the political space.
    - c0achmcguirk 11y ago
      Please no. I think the web community can solve problems faster and more efficiently than governments. Remember the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003? Did it solve our spam problem or did your email provider do it?
      - eternalban 11y ago
        It is a matter of constitutional law and civil rights, not technology. > .. "web" .. This is an issue that is not merely limited to networks, much less simply "web".
    - Sir_Substance 11y ago
      I'm a big fan of the EU's "right to be forgotten". I never quite got how everyone decided that it was a tool for pedophiles. If it had been implemented in a robust way that required companies like google to remove all data about you, I'd be making an annual request, on general principals. Given unlimited political power, I'd probably boil it down to the trifecta of "collecting data about someone, even in anonymised form, constitutes opening an account for them. Accounts are always wholly owned by the person they are about. In the event of multiperson accounts each individual has controlling influence over the account's deletion (see rule three)", "when an account is created the owner or owners must be notified", "upon an account owners request, you must completely delete an account and all associated data, working in good faith to delete it as fast as possible, even if deleting that data will affect other accounts". It probably needs some refining, but the goal is to punish deliberately obfuscatory system designs where data or account information is deliberately entangled to make data deletion impractical, and give people control final control over the gathering of personal data about them. Ultimately, I really liked the Gevulot system from the quantum thief (really worth reading, it's an amazing series). It'd be nice to have an internet based version of the same system.

vog 11y ago

Why don't they simply analyze the log files on their own, without sharing that data with other companies? For example, running some log files offline through AWstats is not that hard, and the AWstats output is quite good for most purposes.

vdaniuk 11y ago
>AWstats is not that hard, and the AWstats output is quite good for most purposes. You haven't done any serious web analytics at scale, have you?
- cbd1984 11y ago
  You're missing the point so comprehensively I have to conclude it's deliberate.
  - vdaniuk 11y ago
    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 significantly increase their efficiency as an organization. Creating a viable alternative to Google Analytics is practically impossible for Mozilla due to lack of resources. 3. 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. Less users for Mozilla means less income from search engine deals and less influence. 4. No meaningful privacy increase for users is achieved, Google Analytics is now installed on (billions - 1) websites. So. You want a non-profit with proven track record of shipping great software and protecting the interests of individuals to take a significant hit in the name of hard-line ideological principle that won't really benefit the users. I guess I am missing the point.
    - mattmanser 11y ago

nodiscpls 11y ago

What sort of analytics do Mozilla actually need?

threeseed 11y ago
I could explain it but it's better to look at the websites of MixPanel, Google Analytics and KissMetrics. Those are three leading players for analytics IMHO. Web analytics for most serious sites are managed by dedicated marketing teams so features are to meet their requirements.
- cbd1984 11y ago
  So they don't actually need analytics at all, it's just marketing people trying to preserve their jobs.

cbd1984 11y ago

Or so they claim. Is there any way for anyone else to verify that?

eli 11y ago
That would be a really weird lie for no reason I can imagine.
- cbd1984 11y ago
  The reason is to make it seem like they care about privacy more than they actually do. Obviously, people care how much they care, hence a reason to lie.

lawl 11y ago

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

chimeracoder 11y ago
> 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/all/all 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.