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Also, PBS Kids Video straight up wouldn't play videos at all unless I whitelisted certain analytics domains.

ABC (the Australian equivalent of BBC) too. The web player sends data to gigya, newrelic and googlegadgetmanager. The news site adds (just the front page) adds jwpcdn, chartbeat and loggly. The live stream are from scribly or someone and often the content of them is embedded twitter, so our national government funded news service isn't even hosting much of their own content and it's unavailable to many that have sites like twitter blocked at world. The don't even have the profit motive excuse that commercial sites have.

I dislike tracking as much as anyone, but can you really fault them for using Google analytics? It's not like PBS choose to use them "to profit off the viewers".

This is the problem, its just convenient and free. People are not thinking about the costs to the end consumer - which in this case is our children. I don't really fault PBS, but I do fault the advertising companies for our general lack of privacy and control over our own data. I also fault the politicians for turning a blind eye to it. I hope Apple's new strategy to go after privacy pays off in a big way and more companies fall in line with it. Or at very least more people begin to think about the trade-offs before blindly injecting google analytics into everything. Self-hosted analytics that does not feed into an advertising giant is not unobtainable goal.

I think most people do realize the cost, and are simply unconcerned with giving google such critical information as "kids watch sesame street".

You think wrong, because it's not just one app.

In fact, so many apps embed these analytics frameworks, that it's possible to make an almost complete picture of what a device was used for every day, including location information, etc on the back-end.

But it's not 'kids watch sesame street' that you're sending to Google. What you're sending is:

* This phone is used by a kid

* $user has children (through association with other devices used at the same location and IP)

* $kid lives at $address (even when it doesn't know the location of $kid's phone, it knows the location of other devices using the same IP)

* $kid goes to $school (using location data from your or your SO's phone when dropping of your kid).

* etc. etc.

A lot of information can be inferred by knowing which other users are associated with a child.

Depending on the apps, you could make some age assumptions of the kid too. Even more, perhaps extrapolate the number of children in the household based on the age-ranges of the apps and the behavior of how they are using the apps. A 3 year old and and a 5 year old are going to have very different usage patterns. The number of children and their age ranges could be a very important metric when considering targeted advertising to the parents. The fact is, this information is used against the consumer to manipulate them into doing things they wouldn't otherwise do - click an ad and perhaps make a purchase. Any bit of information to further that goal will be used, even better if its information about the children since that's a major purchasing factor for parents.

I have a stupid question, why don't they use something like Matomo instead?

"Nobody ever got fired for choosing ___" (fill in the blank with whatever the incumbent is for some technology)

GA today is much more than just pageview analytics. With something like Google Tag Manager, you can have non-technical staff add in event tracking for stuff like form completion or file downloads, without needing to get developers involved. Reporting for stakeholders is also robust because of its integration with Google Data Studio, Google Sheets and other related tools.

Ultimately though, GA wins because these organizations outsource web development and digital marketing work to agencies or contractors, and they are the ones that make the tooling decisions. GA is a known quantity, so even if their contract isn't renewed, a new agency will be able to take over the account fairly frictionlessly.

And there are more contractors that are GA-focused than there are for Matomo, and that's important when you're tasked with shopping around for agencies.

Yes. Do it yourself or don't. Besides that, has any good feature come from using GA?

For the record, all of my projects use self hosted analytics.

But you have to understand, the marketing team wants analytics. You can request to allocate engineers to setup a server with motamo, which will require replication, setup, maintaince, etc.

Your project manager is going to say "Wait this is going to take X man hours, require maintenance, etc? Why don't we just use GA like everyone does, like we always have, as it's free, has builtin redundancy, requires no maintaince, and can be added in 5 minutes?"

They aren't going to even think about privacy. Most consumers don't even care (although they should).

To answer your question though: Instant setup, ease of use, zero-maintance, zero-cost, and it's an industry standard. Literally the only downside is less-flexibility (mostly only applicable to programmers/power users) and privacy issues, which again, not very many consumers or companies care about this form of privacy (but again they should be).

Have you considered a write-up of the issues with the CBeebies app? The BBC is the kind of organisation that might quite easily be shamed into removing those.

Well, theoretically, they will have to remove these to remain in the AppStore with the new guidelines. I hope Apple is able to enforce it.

True, although I presume there's an Android version too...

I think we are overloading what we mean by analytics and the purpose of it. Its not all about collecting profiles of users for advertising. It also about understanding the usage of your application. The BBC should absolutely by tracking the usage of their apps to ensure what the are producing has value, the just shouldn't allow that data to be used for third parties and their ad business. Note that BBC UK apps, and worldwide operate under different schemes.

It's not the fact that they're trying to understand how people use the app, it's that they're using services like Facebook and thereby syphoning more personal data towards corporate entities that have a genuinely terrible track record when it comes to using and abusing people's data.

If I'm not mistaken, Google Analytics isn't used for tracking/targeting across apps and a browser or app beaming statistics won't have that page visit associated with their google account. You don't even need to tick "my app uses the advertisement tracking ID" during app store distribution if you just embed Google analytics.

> These publicly funded apps are siphoning data about me and my little one off to 3rd parties.

If you need some pearls to clutch, there’s an app for that. Unfortunately it contains Google Analytics and ScorecardResearch analytics.

I mean how much can there be to know about a kid? Loves Elmo? Oh better show it ads for Elmo lmao.

You can know who their contacts are and where they are for instance.

Apps do request these permissions, sometimes for legitimate reasons and analytics frameworks then take advantage of that data: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/12/10/business/loca...

What contacts does a toddler have?

Kids under 2 should not even use devices, we're talking about older kids.

Furthermore, those older kids are almost certainly using their parents' device.