> You should make it opt in by default. Or stop doing it!
What? Can you post some examples of sites that already do this? Everybody has analytics on their landing pages, and I don't think I've ever personally seen an opt-in.
What you can find are thousands of examples of site policy pages that say something like: "by choosing to visit our site, you are sharing information with us that we log for the purposes of improving our customer experience. By using our service, you agree to this logging. If you don't want to be logged, then please don't use our service."
Google Analytics is already GDPR compliant, as long as:
* you are not pushing any unencrypted customer data to them in the clear
* you're careful regards who has access to your Google Analytics data
You can (and most businesses will) argue that you need to know how your website is used. It's a completely standard practice that doesn't put user privacy at risk. Moreover, Google has already offered an opt-out to Google Analytics globally, and you would be covered by that. As such, you don't need them to opt-in.
That's not the best analogy - it's more like someone has two chairs in their waiting room and they note which chair is more popular among people waiting, so they can replace the worse chair with a copy of the better one.
Except that this business saves money by allowing a representative of a third party to take the notes. The third party then notes down who sits in the chairs, follows them into the appointment and follows their client to the next business and do the same there.
We're totally open to making this opt-in. I'm curious how we should gather usage data, which some of our nonprofit funders require us to report for their impact questionnaire. How can we know how much the tools are being used if it's opt-in? Or are there other systems (other than Google) that raise fewer concerns?
I really appreciate all the candid advice in this thread and hope that we — and others in similar situations — can use it to improve our products.
A few other meandering thoughts, you'll need to be the one to figure out what makes sense.
- You're already not getting data from people with ad-blockers, consider also respecting Do Not Track[0]
- Be transparent about what you track and how it's used
- The data collected from opt-in users might end up being enough to build convincing enough reports for impact questionnaires?
- Your privacy policy seems confused: "We think the best way to ensure that your personal information stays safe is to never collect any in the first place" then "we only use Google Analytics, which gathers information about our site users and generates aggregate reports to help us figure out who is using our site and extensions, and in what ways"
> With Google Inbox (inbox.google.com) I can Snooze an email for [x] number of days and it'll be gone from my inbox and I don't have to think about it until it comes back.
And... You've just lost standards compliance so you can't use any standards compliant clients. This is a terrible hack of a workaround and you know it :)
No I haven't lost standards compliance. The feature does not interfere with IMAP at all. Sure, I don't get the useful features with a standards complaint client, but why would I expect to?
Aside from the unnecessary snarkiness, here's my main reason for downvoting you:
Even somebody who is familiar with the concept of man pages would have no chance of knowing that xset is the one to look for.
Discoverability is super important. Luckily, the kind of desktops people actually use tend to have a System Settings app in which mouse acceleration can be figured.
Didcovdrability isn't great, but eg: "apropos input" suggest "man xinput" and a quick search points to acceleration along with a pointer to the "xset(1) man page".
Unfortunately it looks like the path from "apropos mouse" might be a bit more convoluted.
Totally agree. This is a problem I have in general with linux - you don't know what you don't know, and using man to find a command to do the thing you need is akin to using a dictionary to find a word to describe a definition you have.
You don't have to model something as complex as our own universe. You only need to model something complex enough that the beings inside the model can't prove that it is a simulation.
EDIT:
Also who says that time inside the simulation has to run the same rate as real time?
THIS is what really freaks me out about quantum mechanics... how eerily close it seems to what a computer engineer working on optimizing a simulation would design...
Humans discovered the laws of nature by solving language optimization problems. It's not a coincidence that things must be this way. The solution to every problem will look like it is the solution to an optimization problem, because optimization is how we solve problems.
We basically perceive the world by simulating it. So we're kind of obligated to model the world as a simulation. That doesn't mean it can't be something different underneath, but we won't understand it in any other terms.
We try to come up with language that accurately describes our experiences and models. Over time that language has come to incorporate a large variety of mathematical notation and physical descriptors that were selected by optimizing for usefulness, completeness, and pedagogical clarity.
