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Comment by skytrue | Hacker News Reader

Just going to pile on here and say that GA is pretty benign. I’m very anti-tracking, but GA at least provides a minimally invasive way to verify whether or not you are providing value to a specific audience.

It’s impossible to always create something perfect for the right audience. It’s a lot of guess work. Without having at least a little data, it’s like shooting in the dark.

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Okay. But is it benign in the context of all of the other information Google tracks?

Google already questions me - "Were you at Seward Park from 7:30 pm to 9:30 pm on May 10th 2018?"

They can combine my maps and analytics usage to see when I'm at a PC and when I'm out and about.

Additionally, they have my login data to a number of sites. And my Youtube history. As well as everything sent back by Android and Chrome. And my Gmail history.

> As well as everything sent back by Android and Chrome.

And if you use Chrome Sync, they also have (and legally declare that they will use) your browsing history.

GA is not benign at all, since it allows Google to track you across websites. It is an abomination that needs to be stamped out radically. You can use piwik or something else that you can run from your own domain.

So, just to repeat my stance: Google already knows everything about me. I have accepted that, sort of.

However, they have crossed a line: they have made URLs ugly by default.

Not sure I totally get this argument. The U in UTM tag stands for Urchin. They set this standard sometime before they were acquired by Google in 2005.

I agree. For me tracking is an annoyance, but this particular practice should be regarded as bad web design. It should be roundly denounced by the tech community. Why are so many web developers so willing to mess up their URLs in this way?

Google doesn't know everything about me. I don't use gmail, I don't use google search, and I have an iPhone.

GA gives them basically all of my browsing habits. It's crazy.

GA is a cog in a much more nefarious machine, no matter how "benign" it might be on its own.

Analytics, maps, recaptcha, and fonts, not to mention all the data siphoned from Android, are pieces of a mass surveillance apparatus, used openly for advertising, but potentially shared with governments around the world.

It's bad enough even when it stays inside Google and isn't shared with anyone else.

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