On Thu, 2013-12-26 at 13:00 -0500, Andrew Starr-Bochicchio wrote: > What exactly are you proposing? At least for Sphinx, and I imagine > other tools, things like adsense aren't automatically injected into > the html. The author must explicitly add this stuff into the template. > I agree that we don't want package documentation in Debian to be > calling home, but if someone using Sphinx as a static webpage > generator wants to add Google Analytics to their site I don't see why > Debian should have a position on that. I certainly don't see Sphinx > upstream adding any code to automatically strip out such things. In > fact, Sphinx Contrib contains a Google Analytics plugin that makes it > easier to add the snippet to the generated files. It also adds a > 'google_analytics' option to conf.py which can be set to False to > disable adding the snippet.
Thoughts: Google Analytics is non-free JavaScript running in user's browsers and non-free code running on Google servers. As promoters of software and user freedom I think this provides a solid reason for us to encourage upstreams to just drop GA or switch a libre alternative solution like piwik if they need to analyse website visitor traffic. Asking website visitors to report themselves to one of the larger commercial surveillance and advertising networks in the world isn't a particularly friendly thing to do. Most web browsers will blindly load GA so in practice this is actually forcing most website visitors to report to Google. Surveillance isn't good for user freedom so I think this provides another reason to encourage upstreams to drop GA. Personally whenever I see this tag or this issue on upstream websites I will encourage them to either just drop GA or use piwik instead if they actually need what GA provides. I encourage everyone else on this list to do the same. I also encourage people to consider disabling JavaScript in your browser by default. As the Tor/Firefox attacks (CVE-2013-1690) showed, this is a good idea anyway. > Maybe we should package this for Debian and encourage its use for > people wanting to use GA. That way we'd only need a one line patch to > conf.py rather than some script parsing all the html. That sounds like a good idea. -- bye, pabs http://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise
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