A concise historical timeline re U.S. libraries from the 1700s into the modern era, privacy stance, and government responses to perceived threats: Historical Overview – Data Privacy Project
So one might not think that one’s reading (or listening) would be subject to commercial exploitation (at least). If only that were true!
I would like to see this kind of web site “virus” banned. Google (and others) have managed to get their tentacles into thousands of web sites, so that it is impossible to use those thousands of unrelated web sites without interacting with Surveillance Capitalism (or, conversely, if you PiHole too aggressively, the web site just stops working). The ban might as well start with government and quasi-government web sites, since that is on more solid legal and political and commercial ground.
Fun quote from the link in the OP:
Library privacy became national news in 2005 when George Christian, then executive director of Library Connection, a Connecticut library consortium, received a National Security Letter (NSL) from the FBI. The Feds, under the US Patriot Act, demanded library patron information without a warrant and imposed a lifetime gag order that forbade disclosure of the NSL.
Christian and three colleagues, who became known as the Connecticut Four, refused to comply and a district court eventually found the gag order unconstitutional, prompting the government to drop its demand. In 2007, the Patriot Act’s gag order provision was struck down in Doe v. Gonzales.
That by itself supports the contention that libraries do care about “patrons’ privacy and civil liberties” (in the US). Props to the Connecticut Four.
Agreed. The number of sites that use Google Analytics is actually in the millions, I read somewhere recently. And probably increasing daily.
(Don’t get me started on the other usual suspects.)
It’s bad enough that healthcare services think it’s OK to poison their websites with that crap.
I am pretty sure that Google Analytics is safe to PiHole though. I do and have done for years, without apparent ill-effect. The dangers are the ones that I don’t know about and the ones that I do know about but where blocking the domain causes malfunction. I would really like to block *google* but I am reasonably sure that such a broad block does cause malfunction (and, yes, I am aware that that could match domains that have nothing at all to do with Google but it’s a hypothetical anyway).
You might wanna look into how uBlock Origin handles GA (and many others of these common trackers that are now plaguing the entire web): instead of blocking the GA script, it executes its own “dummy” and feeds the Octopus with irrelevant/unusable data - so that the Octopus be happy (but in fact can do nothing with this data…)
Yes. And that is the sad truth of where we have been led to by surveillance capitalism: it is now the norm that we MUST give our data to the powers that rule the internet. If we don’t allow this, resist and block their trackers, we are now considered “weirdos”, sociopaths or even deviants. That’s what the recaptcha is for, and it is our punishment.
I don’t have a problem with that. In most cases it is well-motivated.
The problem is that the designer of any web site would use pieces that are dynamically accessed by the web browser from Surveillance Capitalist web sites and/or such pieces that are executed by the web browser. (Surveillance problems might still exist if the web site designer uses server side pieces that are Surveillance Capitalists but that would be relatively opaque to us, and probably less intrusive.)