On 24/10/18 13:47, Samuli Seppänen wrote: > Hi, > > The OpenVPN Inc. webmaster would like to add Google Analytics to > community.openvpn.net, i.e. our Trac wiki/bug tracker. I said we need to > consult the community first because GA can be seen as a form of spying. > Here's our webmaster's view on this subject: > > --- > > "The goal of this would be to understand what information first-time > users are finding the most valuable on community.openvpn.net." > > "As this is a publicly accessible community without the requirement to > join to read the articles, it would be advantageous for all to > understand which pieces of content the public are finding the most > useful, what encourages them to become a part of the community, and what > potentially persuaded them to use start using a commercial product." > > "As openvpn.net links to community.openvpn.net and vice versa this will > also help us to understand the complete journey of a user and help to > improve the website experience, which can only be seen as a positive." > > --- > > In today's community meeting there was some concern about the spying > aspect of Google Analytics, but nobody was strongly opposed. This was I > believe, in part, because it is fairly easy to block Google Analytics if > one so wishes. > > So, what do _you_ think?
I personally am against any external third party blockers, and in particular in the correlation with sites and projects trying to protect users data, such as VPNs. This is an information leak to a third-party, and when that third-party is Google who earns money on harvesting data and user pattern I do get concerns. Trackers are on all my systems blocked by default in addition to using EFF's Privacy Badger, the DuckDuckGo add-on and ad-blockers subscribed to additional lists blocking trackers. I do not think I'm unique in any way, and would expect other visitors to openvpn.net to do the same - as many users want to use OpenVPN to protect their data. I fully understand and value the webmaster provides and the value of such tracking. But I would rather have us look at some tracking which does not expose this information to an external third-party. There are solutions like Matomo (former PIWIK) [1] which gives a similar utility but does not leak any information to third-parties. There might be others too, but this is one I've been playing with some other places earlier. [1] <https://matomo.org/> -- kind regards, David Sommerseth OpenVPN Inc
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