The amount of technological voodoo in web-related things makes me hesitant to respond here. However, here goes. At a very quick glance, I notice a few things.
First, the googerteller app seems like it does not intelligently differentiate between kinds of web requests. Innocuous cross-origin GET requests without cookies or added query args will be treated the same as other requests. Additionally, it doesn't appear as if the app differentiates between IP's. Can someone verify that the IP's in this one guy's minimal github application are legitimately ones that collect data? The link from their github page to the google list of IP's seems to indicate the list is too large and will make a lot of web requests audible that are not necessarily google related. For example, there are many mom and pop websites without analytics or telemetry that are hosted by google services (eg. virtual machines in the cloud) and would show up under those IP ranges, afaict. Other popular services like cloudflare or whatnot might be using google infrastructure underneath as well. Assuming https termination, is that not okay? Second, the only google request I see when loading https://map.casariolab.art/ are for the Roboto font and material design assets: https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=Roboto:wght@500&display=swap https://fonts.gstatic.com/s/roboto/v30/KFOlCnqEu92Fr1MmEU9fBBc4AMP6lQ.woff2 I don't see cookies or anything else being sent with these requests to google. You can verify this yourself if you open the developer tools in your browser (safari, chrome, and firefox all have them now). Go to the 'network' tab and load the map application. However, I do see something that isn't picked up by the googerteller app. The map app is storing a google analytics cookie and sending it on requests to https://map.casariolab.art/geoserver/wfs You can see the cookie in the browser developer tools under 'application->cookies' (the google analytics cookies all start with _GA) and see them being sent under the 'network' tab. Again, these are only being sent to map.casariolab.art and not google directly. What the app does behind the scene with that info is hidden from me, but I imagine it is not passing it further along to google; in which case, it is no more damaging than standard web logs. (note: in a private tab, I no longer see this cookie, so maybe app had analytics once but got rid of them recently?) An added note: Material design is google's design language and something a LOT of folks use to make designing web applications easier. Using something like that means you don't have to waste time thinking about hard issues like layout and various animated widgets, not to mention bigger, more difficult, topics like accessibility in design. Google's massive and well-paid team has put a lot of these thoughts into usable design and code for you. I personally don't use it, but understand why someone would. This is a cool project and it doesn't look like https://map.casariolab.art is sending any _harmful_ data to google directly. (Please correct me if wrong here) Without detracting from the conversation about the mapping project itself (I think it deserves its own above the app layer), I would love to hear more from nettime if there is a different assessment or more enlightened ways to think about hosting your data and applications on the web without "feeding the beast". Is it as easy as avoiding to use google analytics, or does one need to consider more? What else? Can we accept the usage of google's open source artifacts, of which there are many, as a trade-off to more easily develop applications? Is there a way of talking about these issues that simultaneously respects the complexity and elasticity of the technology, but doesn't trail too far into the weeds? -august. # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
