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Comment by STRiDEX | Hacker News Reader

I've seen this crop up a few times recently and a vocal minority seems to panic every time. I ran into it the other day installing pm2 w/ npm which downloads an optional package that they use for analytics https://github.com/Unitech/pm2/blob/master/package.json#L184

Is the problem that they are using google's service? Is it the tracking that people don't like? Is it the messaging/copy to the users? I'm sure there's plenty of people on hacker news that build analytics software for a living. I've worked on email click and open tracking. Doesn't seem terrible if it helps them build their product.

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You know...you can already get analytics if your mirrors just agree to share logs. It may not be as detailed or complete, for sure, but using another analytical tools does feel a little superfluous.

> Is the problem that they are using google's service?

This is part of it I think. The brew devs get stats, but so does Google which they can aggregate across everything. Standing up your own analytics server/cluster, especially for a project the size of brew, wouldn't be trivial and I can see why they leverage Google's service.

But I can understand people not wanting to have data sent to Google. I moved everything off Gmail to my own E-mail server back in 2013 and moved search to DuckDuckGo.

Does google simply have access to you analytics data to do whatever they want? I was under the impression that they could only use it in ways that you the account holder defines.

It depends on what you mean by "access to your analytics data." Anonymized, aggregated data is being used to inform product decisions, but engineers don't have direct access to the production database to query whatever they want. There are almost no cases where you'll be granted approval to look at real user data, and if you are granted access, 100% of your activity is monitored.

As a side note, this has been the case at every big company I've worked at, not just Google.

Privacy erodes one complacent action at a time. Every time people secretly (if it weren't subversive the default would be opt-in) funnel information off to Google or some other massive aggregation point, we should raise hell rather than bending over and accepting this hostile behavior.

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