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Comment by throwaway425 | Hacker News Reader

You find it very, very hard to get outraged because you either use GA yourself and do not wish to acknowledge your complicity in the matter or you've simply failed to make the obvious leap from analytics to clickstream data.

Google wants to know what web pages you visit, when, and how often, and a GA beacon that phones home that information placed on every web page is the easiest way for them to do it.

EDIT: there are either a lot of angry GA users in this thread or Google apologists. Either was, I do believe Google is now or will soon use GA for clickstream tracking. I also believe this is why they offer to host frequently requested assets like JQuery.

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> why they offer to host frequently requested assets like JQuery

Let's not forget the Google Fonts, which exist to "make web beautiful". How adorable and altruistic. Yay! /throws-confetti

Yes, let's not forget the fonts and js libraries served on cookie-less domains for speed. Surely, these are part of a plan to create a New World Order. https://developers.google.com/fonts/faq#Privacy

Cookies don't matter when browser fingerprinting accomplishes the same task. Read the page you linked to:

"We do log records of the CSS and the font file requests, and access to this data is on a need-to-know basis and kept secure."

Just like every other Google Privacy Policy, it's insultingly disingenuous, couched in terms of protecting your privacy while actually reserving for themselves the right to violate it by collecting enough information on you for you to be uniquely identified and storing that information indefinitely.

Okay, WTF? Name a web server out there that doesnt keep logs.

Your constant projecting of ulterior motives, absent any evidence, on a throwaway account, is the very definition of worthless, gratuitously negative content. The guy upthread is complaining that requests are cached for a day.

I'm sorry, would y'all prefer that they not be cached?

Google's motive is to make money, and they do that largely through advertising. There's nothing ulterior about the motive I'm suggesting. More information on you means they can charge a higher price for the privilege of advertising certain products or services to you. Of course, the fact that the same information they sell to advertisers is also easily accessible by the government with a mere subpoena, if even that, is of little concern to Google, Eric Schmidt, or remarkably even to many HN posters in this thread.

I'm sorry, can you present a plausible scenario in which the government (or any other entity for that matter) cares which web browser I download?

And as to this: it's insultingly disingenuous - no, it really isn't. Every piece of web server software in the world keeps logs. Would you prefer they lied?

You seem hell-bent on damning Google for not doing anything particularly evil in this case. And it doesn't look like you're willing to have your mind changed, either.

From your link.

> Requests for CSS assets are cached for 1 day

Tracking font request "only" once per day is still spying.

Also, regarding your jump from Google's attack on our privacy to a larger to that "New World Order" reference is highly offensive. You're building a straw-man that was not stated, and perpetuating the belief that someone who complains about their privacy being attack must be some sort of "conspiracy theory nutter".

There are no cookies. Claiming that Google is "tracking" users for some nefarious "attack on privacy" with these properties is "highly offensive" to my bullshit detector.

It is very well known that cookies are not the only way to track activity. You insistence that Google somehow doesn't do the trivial step of JOINing a few tables together with any of the many possible candidate keys that browsers leak is laughable. Even plain apache logs have the IP address, which is all the "cookie" they need for those of us that have static IP addresses. Even with DHCP, Google only needs to do an INNER JOIN style query to associate that IP with any of the other requests made in the same time period to their servers such as google-analytics.

And all that doesn't even begin to touch "panopticlick" style entropy gathering.

In case you are interested in learning what how Google works, instead only looking at the facade they show you, I suggest watching the presentation[1] Aral Balkan gave at the same event that hosted djb's recent talk (which is also recommended). You won't like it - possibly violently - but maybe you can learn a bit about how the world actually works..

[1] https://projectbullrun.org/surveillance/2015/video-2015.html...

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