Also, requiring Javascript in a single page application is a terrible design for this kind of site. Almost all of this can be static pages or traditional web frameworks. Requiring Javascript made the download much larger than necessary, slowed down the page load time a lot, and forced the page to reflow multiple times as the data arrived. A wide variety of web frameworks could have rendered and cached static pages instead of massively over-engineering the site as an "app".
Just a wild guess here, but I bet they're using Google Analytics for the same reason everyone else uses Google Analytics--to see what their audience is looking at.
> Also, requiring Javascript in a single page application is a terrible design for this kind of site.
Good luck making a single page application without Javascript! It is all in 25 requests and 668KB, not the lightest site, but that's actually less data than the homepage of Google is today. It's also properly setting expires headers so future page loads are very quick.
I know why they want analytics; I'm asking why they are giving out live tracking data to a single private company. This free data is effectively a subsidy.
> Good luck making a single page application without Javascript
The bad design decision was making it a single page application in the first place. This should be a static site, or very lightweight (and easily cached) framework.
> 25 requests and 668KB
That's an obscene amount of bloat. This should be 3-5 requests not counting images, and 668kB is an order of magnitude too big.
> less data than the homepage of Google is today
Comparing against another massively over-engineered, bloated web page isn't particularly useful.
> expires headers
That's great, but it doesn't affect the initial download size or the memory/CPU usage in the user agent.
> I know why they want analytics; I'm asking why they are giving out live tracking data to a single private company. This free data is effectively a subsidy.
How is it a subsidy? They are getting the analytical data they want and are not having to pay anything for it. They could spend tons of time and money to build an analytics system, but that sounds like a waste of tax dollars. You'll also notice that their code is hosted on GitHub, is that a subsidy too?
Mobile browsers don't always keep things until the server says they expire. That being said a frequent user will probably end up saving data in the long run.
I hear they use Ford vehicles and Boeing airplanes as well. Highly inappropriate for the US Government to use products from some of the US's biggest companies!
Analytics makes websites better, and Piwik is not easy or cheap to use at scale. Sharing web traffic data with Google Analytics (especially with IPs anonymized) is a pretty small issue IMO, especially when the benefits are you get good data like what's on analytics.usa.gov.
While I'm sure you have good intentions in trying to anonymize the collected data, you should know that the claims made by Google at [1] are highly misleading. Their claim is that they strip the last octet of the IP address, but that isn't nearly enough cooking to call the data "anonymous".
Assuming Google actually does this and isn't simply lying about saving the full IP (which has to be sent to them, as it is obviously in the SRC field of the IP header), this means they are only binning IPs into groups of 256. They only need at most 8 bits of identifying data other than the IP to uniquely correlate individuals within each IP group.
More than 8 bits of unique ID are available, given that various types of data that being tracked[2] about the user agent and (presumably) IP geolocation.
Also, Google is keeping enough of the IP to lookup the ASN.
> I work on analytics.usa.gov.
So if you're actually interested in claiming that "The program does not track individuals, and anonymizes the IP addresses of visitors"[2], then you really shouldn't be using an analytics service that - in spite of their claims of anonymizing" some data - obvious is tracking individuals and saving the most interesting parts of their IP address.
> Sharing web traffic data with Google Analytics [...] is a pretty small issue IMO,
Building profiles of everything we read or do online is probably the largest problem we will have going forward into the future. Data doesn't go away, and the problem compounds when the data can be correlated with other types of data. If you think this isn't a problem, then you really need to study what is possible with pattern-of-life analysis[4].
