throwaway425

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.

>What is your suggestion, that they should abandon all analytics

Ideally, yes. Or at the very least don't use Google for it. Use something like Pwiki instead. Or perhaps try actually allowing your users to decide what if any information they feel comfortable sharing with you.

There are other non-profits like the Wikimedia Foundation and the Internet Archive whose websites still somehow manage to function despite not triggering any of the multitude of filter rules that plugins like uBlock ship with.

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.

If it's on Google's servers, then clearly Mozilla employees aren't the only ones with access to it, and the anonymization he's referring to is mere IP address anonymization, where the last octet of an IPv4 address is zeroed. The viability of browser fingerprinting as demonstrated by the EFF's Panopticlick shows cookies, cross-domain or otherwise, are no longer the only viable means to persistently tracking users.

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.

It's a valid objection. GA at this point is on most websites you visit. The data is forwarded to Google where it's processed and stored forever. GA is one of the biggest threats to privacy on the web, and any company claiming to care about your privacy should not be using it.

I justed visited https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/ and browsed the source, and they still have the Google Analytics tracking crap on their website. Strange for a company that claims to be "committed to your privacy."