On Wednesday, April 30, 2014 3:54:21 PM UTC+2, Michael Kelly wrote: > Stacy Martin from Mozilla's Privacy team helped consider this question, > > and concluded that GA did meet our requirements for privacy-respectful > > analytics. As mentioned in the bug, there was a discussion when we > > first switched to GA that outlines the details: > > https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/mozilla.governance/9IQvIubDOXU/0tWVVlrUJOQJ
I've read the previous discussion again and I think we may want to revisit this decision, at least as a long-term goal. First, it was made two years ago when Mozilla wasn't so vocal about Privacy and User control as our core values. We hadn't tools like Lightbeam producing a heavy cognitive dissonance when visiting that page (incidentally, I didn't saw it on first try because I asked Adblock Plus to prevent websites from tracking me). One could say that Lightbeam isn't smart enough to detect if we opted for anonymized tracking and that we should fix that. I think thas isn't the problem. The problem is we are using a tracking tool from the very same company that we argue is tracking us online, by sending them all information they would need to track us. It doesn't matter if Mozilla has an agreement with them because: * The user doesn't know that. Even if https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1003804 was fixed, nobody reads all the small print. All they will see is we send their data to Google, period. * If they don't trust that organization in the first place, no signed agreement will convince them anyway. The other argument I saw is that Google Analytics is the best tool available on the market, and replacing it would be hard. Hard because we would have to host it ourselves. Or buy external hosting and pay people to maintain that. Or find people to create new tools or improve existing ones (Piwik comes in mind) until they become as good, diverting them from more important tasks (not sure what they could be). Or that we would have to retrain staff to use the new tools. I think these are bad excuses. The right thing being hard is never a good excuse for not doing the right thing. If that means hiring more people, or mobilizing more community members to achieve that goal, or lose a few months of good statistics, so be it. We've done the same thing before with several projects, like the Kuma platform for documentation and support. In short, we just need to start putting our money where our mouth is, or stop pretending we care about all that privacy stuff. -- Benoit _______________________________________________ governance mailing list governance@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/governance
