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Comment by nonrandomstring | Hacker News Reader

Hoorah to that! We are lucky to have wonderful .gov services; highly available, accessible, frictionless, simple, informative, well written and bullshit-free. Maybe the best online central government services in the world - though I hear Estonia are a contender too.

However I live in perpetual fear that at any moment some corrupt minister will do a deal with Microsoft and the Devil. Out will go plain HTML and common interoperable standards, simple authentication, and in will come a vipers nest of javascript calling home to monstrous tracking infrastructure, AWS containers, Cloudflare MITM, hooked into some hideous TPM module and mandatory smartphone camera garbage that scans my iris....

Somehow there is a stronghold of common sense and decency standing its ground within our government. I almost wish I could pay a little extra tax to fund them.

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Umm, GOV.UK uses Google Analytics, Fastly CDN, AWS containers, and I believe is developing an app.

(I worked at GDS until two years ago.)

Like he said:

> a stronghold of common sense and decency

I get that OP was going for something else but…

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with those things when in the right hands.

gov.uk is not a monolith, different departments can make different decisions. There is no mandate for AWS containers or Fastly CDN.

They have to provision from a market place of approve service though right?

They tend to use the tools provided by Government Digital Services.

Yes, this is the point and the reason it's so good. Centralization and standardization. I'm so glad that my country (Turkey) has made big leaps in centralization of digital services in the recent years with E-Government platform. I even recently wrote the Presidency Public Communcations Center, suggesting every citizen should have a government-issued email address and that an email account must be a right. E-mail is a necessity at this point and it's unacceptable that anyone can lose access to their email account just because Google's ML models decided he's a bot. The government could easily verify every real citizen.

Indeed, but everything still works for me even though much of that stuff is blackholed here. These are common efficiencies (mistakes on my opinion fwiw) and hopefully we can further improve data-leakage and bring even more things properly back in-house.

Not to be too gushing or naive, I am quite aware that in the UK we recently "sold" big chunks of GCHQ to Amazon, so I'm not all wide eyed that parts of our government IT aren't idiots.

Sold parts of GCHQ? Could you elaborate? That sounds rather bad.

Some but not all of it run-of-the-mill corruption from the usual suspects like Priti Patel. There's not much of Britain left to sell to private equity and Big Tech, but they're always working on finding new "markets".

https://www.ft.com/content/74782def-1046-4ea5-b796-0802cfb90...

https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/amazon-signs-deal-with-brit...

Everyone uses Google Analytics. I don't find it particularly high up any list of real worries.

I don’t.

I despise Google and what they became and so should you.

Maybe my 10 visits a day webpage is an anomaly, and I’m truly the only one not using Google analytics - Still, don’t pretend Google analytics is used by everyone.

For our podcast we specifically set up Plausible to exclude Google analytics. Rather little of value to be gained or lost either way, but it's a matter of conscience and politeness to our users. Sadly we had to put in links to other big-tech application platforms, but those are links to click out of choice if you're a user of those services.

This is always the problem when interacting with the corporate internet. I have a Shopify store on my website where my readers can buy mugs and t-shirts to support me(not that anyone is lol). Lord knows what goes on in there.

I hope someone reinvents the services we take for granted with a focus on privacy.

> I despise Google and what they became and so should you

It's a bit laughable to talk about despising a company over this stuff. We're not talking about an evil regime, or even Nestle for what they did with breast milk in Africa. It's so over the top.

Why does the government need to send its data to google exactly?

Should they instead invest time and public money into solving simple product problems (“how many times was this thing looked at?”) in a way that can be understood by the average desk worker? When that problem is well met by the private sector?

> Should they instead invest time and public money into solving simple product problems ... when that problem is well met by the private sector?

I think the answer is yes, and in my earlier post said I'd actually be happy to give more money for government projects that protect peoples' privacy better. For me the problem is not "well met by the private sector" because that solution imposes a hidden externality upon the public end-users. Part of the price we pay is leaking of our data to a non-national private company.

I'm not sure using Google Analytics qualifies as an "externality" but even if it does the UK government has proven time and time again it doesn't give a damn about anyone's privacy, so what makes you think any in-house version would be any better for privacy? Because it would certainly be worse from a technical standpoint.

> what makes you think any in-house version would be any better for privacy?

Well, it's a personal value judgement what is "better" of course, but for me being British, I see my government as having some legitimate interest in what I am doing, especially when transacting with them.

On the other hand, a gargantuan for-profit American corporation that enriches it's shareholders and was once run by Eric Schmidt, whose legendary face-palm gaffes buried "Don't be Evil" under a smoking heap of sulphurous brimstone....

  "We know where you are. We know where you’ve been. We can more or
  less know what you’re thinking about"

No thanks!

My government may be a sneaky bunch of bastards, but so far they've had the good manners not to openly show utter contempt for privacy.

I’d say they are “your bunch of sneaky bastards”.

I’d rather have my government doing web analytics than some faceless corporation from across the globe.

Might be of course different for people in totalitarian regimes - but as far as I am concerned I still can vote on ones in my country.

Yes, we should. In fact, I believe every unit of governance of human society (read: nation) should be as independent as possible in every area necessary for its functioning. This means every nation should be completely independent in all of the technology it uses. This is obviously impossible. Not every nation even has the required raw resources, energy input or workforce. So no point in even trying. Luckily, all of this unfathomable monument and mess of concrete and asphalt and silicon which is called global human civilization has not even 50 years left to its total collapse. But oh, wait a minute, let me open the door... This must be your new FPV drone from China, son! Came fast, isn't it? It has only been one week...

French government websites use matomo if i m not mistaken

Makes sense, the French have a strong open source community and I believe the creator is French.

https://commission.europa.eu/europa-analytics_en

A lot of people use google analytics for no logical reason what soever though. Typical use case for a small to medium website seems to be a list of most visited pages.

That's a perfectly logical reason to use GA. As long as HTTP servers don't have a built-in UI for analytics, people will continue to use GA (with server side Measurement Protocol for counting hits from people with adblockers) for that use case.

GA and external CDNs require cookie banner/consent under GDPR (which is still valid in UK AFAIK). So that alone should be reason enough to avoid it.

But you can never be sure: very recently, I'm seeing (unnecessary) popups coming up informing me about the site not using cookies! To make up for the phantom pain of not having one in EU where "real" sites do have cookie dialogs? The web and its self-referential UI idioms have become a strange place indeed.

IDK if those are, in themselves, indicators. The idea is not purity. The idea is for technical common sense to win over sales/consultant-led architecture.

>(I worked at GDS until two years ago.)

If you could tell, why did you leave?

It's the HTML forms that are good and Angular, React and all that which are bad.

I wonder what technology they are using to wrangle these forms... I remember reading an article a few days ago concerning vuejs project to do something similar.

My form building library is used for all the form wrangling.

https://govuk-form-builder.netlify.app/

Why does that matter?

Singapore recently did a deal with a company no one has heard of for their immigration process and the results are cameras that don’t work to the point of the officials needing to manually adjust them, forms that don’t contain consistent data across pages, and my favorite “save a photo of the confirm just in case lah.” The old system just worked, the new system insists upon APPs.

> Singapore recently did a deal with a company no one has heard of for their immigration process

Source? I've lived in Singapore all my life and have not heard of this. There was an outage on the 31st of March[1], and parliamentary discussion after that[2] doesn't mention any of what you said.

[1]: https://www.channelnewsasia.com/singapore/changi-airport-ter...

[2]: https://www.mha.gov.sg/mediaroom/parliamentary/oral-reply-to...

“Recently” is admittedly subjective but I was just there (2 times in 3 weeks) and can confirm it’s a new system to 4 years ago when the foreign passes were all paper. I think it’s called Tacent. It was so bad a local woman couldn’t even get in and they had to have her wait in the foreign line. You can simply visit the existing immigration website, as it’s public, to view the inconsistent data-the same forms that are displayed on their iPads in the reception hall. This wasn’t an outage, just poor technology implementation.

>>simple authentication

This is my only gripe. Every time I do self assessment or complete my tax returns as a contractor I had to find some arcane combination of government gateway ID, password, authentication app etc etc. It's so secure it stops you paying the government money.

Entirely off-topic, but why do some comments on HN have manual line breaks but most just soft-wrap? On my phone (Hacki app) each line is soft-wrapped, then hard-wrapped after 1 or 2 words, which looks quite off

Half of the technologies you named are actually useful and it wouldn’t shock me if gov.uk uses them

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