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Comment by leephillips | Hacker News Reader

I don’t find it idiotic. It was the client’s decision to spy on its users. I have no sympathy for companies who make that decision.

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Why do you have to be sympathetic to the client in order to also condemn Google? If someone was selling bleach as a cure for autism through a network of distributors, do you have to be sympathetic to the distributors in order to condemn the manufacturer?

> It was the client’s decision to spy on its users.

Calling it spying is a little far-fetched I think, when the problem was the transfer ip addresses to US servers, not Analytics itself.

Like most people, I have an IP that is unique to me, and will be for weeks, maybe months, until some event causes my ISP to assign me a new one. Google can track and correlate my activity across all the websites that I visit that happen to use GA. In this way they can build a profile. If I used Gmail, they could include information from the content of my email, which they admit their computers examine. With enough data it would be a simple matter to detect when my IP changed, and continue to amass the profile. If this isn’t spying, then nothing is.

Oh, I think I wasn't clear. I meant saying that the client is deciding to spy is a bit far-fetched. Google of course.

It was the client’s decision to use the service.

Which is a decision to spy on the users.

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