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Comment by sneak | Hacker News Reader

Why does time.gov need analytics? None of the usual reasons businesses cite as requiring them are valid here.

The accountability of government to the people would be the primary reason, the idea being to show the value for the money you're being taxed.

But to answer your specific question, regardless of whether it's needed or not, it's mandatory. https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/whitehouse.gov/files/omb/me... requirement #2

Interesting stuff. Surprised to see such tech literacy on the White House’s website.

The fed is also responsible for making ghidra. Not everyone working for the fed is a lawyer.

You shouldn't be. There are incredibly competent technologists currently in positions to deliver.

https://www.usds.gov/

https://18f.gsa.gov/

Think a little deeper about that: the government doesn’t need to sell things but that doesn’t mean that the people building sites don’t care about knowing who’s visiting, what they do, or how the site performed. For example, when do you stop spending more money supporting old browsers?

There’s even an open source project around the public analytics.usa.gov dashboard:

https://github.com/18F/analytics.usa.gov

Why is it not okay when the NSA does it, but okay when the individual sub-organizations engage in domestic spying like this?

There is nothing special about visitors to .gov websites vs any other major website. You stop supporting old browsers when their installed base gets small enough; this has nothing to do with analytics or those specific sites under surveillance.

If you think this is what the NSA was doing, you should learn more about that. While you’re doing so, ask whether there’s a difference between the owner of a site getting basic visitor information or a third-party compromising other services to get far more personal information which they would otherwise not have access to. This is the difference between me noticing what type of car you drive when you visit and constantly recording every cars’ occupants, destination, and topics of conversation in the entire city.

Finally, you’re also wrong about how sites use analytics: global stats don’t matter much compared to your actual visitors, whose demographics can vary significantly. Every site I’ve worked on since the mid-90s has found that to be important enough to do basic analytics of the sit under discussion here.

This is silent, nonconsensual surveillance of large groups of people. Basically the same thing the NSA does, just in this case scoped to a specific website.

Calling it analytics doesn’t make it not mass surveillance.

It’s not okay when either group does it. I’m surprised to see that “the government should not spy on its citizens” is such a controversial belief.

You can view dot gov analytics here, by the way.

https://analytics.usa.gov/

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