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Comment by rkachowski | Hacker News Reader

This is google analytics. It's a bit different than google directly taking the data and using it for google purposes (e.g. streetview cars gathering SSID information for location pinpointing). The data (afaik) is used only by the homebrew team instead of Google.

A more accurate summary would be "Brew is sending usage data to a google owned analytics service".

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The data still goes to google. While the expectation would be that the data is only used by homebrew, there's no actual way of knowing that google isn't gratefully helping itself. And given the entire way Google's business works, they probably are.

Given the number of people who work for Google, and Google's internal culture of openness, I find it extremely unlikely that Google is violating its customers' privacy. That would almost certainly get whistleblown.

>and Google's internal culture of openness

Does not exist like you think when it comes to projects. People are very secretive about lots of projects for all kinds of internal political reasons. Using data they technically have the right to use in a somewhat scummy way is a perfect example of a project that would be kept out of the spotlight.

Like how the PRISM program got whistleblown by Googlers? Oh wait, that never happened.

Threat of jail / treason conviction is a lot stronger than the threat of being fired by google.

I can totally see someone caving for the one and not the other.

Google never cooperated with PRISM. As soon as news came out that the NSA was tapping Google's intra-datacenter dedicated lines, Google announced they would accelerate encrypting all that traffic.

https://www.google.com/amp/arstechnica.com/information-techn...

Do you have any source that can back your suspicion that Google breaks their own policies for Analytics?

if google didn't correlate analytics data from multiple sources, it would be about as informative as a local piwik install, which is to say "not much".

Perhaps they don't "use" it directly, but surely they use it to improve their statistical profile of the specific users? Does anyone know if the GA cookie sent by brew is same or correlated with the one in the browser?

From the source code it looks like brew uses a UUID generated locally (e.g. from a source like /proc/sys/kernel/random/uuid). I don't see how it could be correlated with anything in the browser.

In terms of the analytics URL they set the client-ID, which indicates a "particular instance of an application install": https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection...

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