Mozilla aren't selling anything on that page. They won't be making key engineering decisions off of the page.
Could you detail the gains that they could make that makes the world a better place? That justify any sort of tracking over '300, 000 people viewed this page today' that you can get from your own logs?
There is some data that might be occasionally useful, like screen sizes, but only occasionally.
1. Mozilla launches a new translation initiative for Firefox that is announced on the index page and links to the landing page for the initiative. Google Analytics(GA) allows them to understand the clickthrough rate of the announcement and conversion rate of visitors joining the initiative for all combinations of channels/geographies/mediums and optimizing them.
Benefit: Firefox users get better localization as more people join.
2. Mozilla Development Network(MDN, good) competes with W3Schools(bad) for top results in search engines for JS/HTML/CSS related queries. GA has great tools for analysis for search engine traffic and integration with Google Webmaster Tools(GWT) that provides data for MDN team to do better SEO.
Benefit: MDN team increases traffic to their high-quality educational information and attracts attention of more users, strengthening Mozilla and Firefox brand.
3. Mozilla wants to teach web technologies to people and promote collaborations with Webmaker. Webmaker team can use Google Analytics custom events tool to collect and monitor specific users actions in the product. That provides data for optimization of onboarding experience for new users. For example, after upgrading UX/UI 50% more users will remix and publish a Webmake.
Benefit: more users successfully learn web technologies and create web content for fun/profit.
4. Mozilla gets a significant amount of revenue from search engine deals. Every install of a browser directly translates in small, but measurable increase of funding for Mozilla's projects. Google Analytics content experiments is a great tool for A/B and multivariate testing for increasing conversions on their Firefox download pages.
Benefit: Increase in browser installs, therefore increase in revenue, therefore increase of cool projects done by Mozilla.
Really, this is just a tiny number of possible use cases of Google Analytics by Mozilla. The efficiency boost by using an advanced web analytics software is immense and there is no open source alternative.
It's not Kerbal Space Program advanced level of analytics-foo, this is basic day-to-day stuff for growth hackers/startup founders/marketers/bloggers.
- See how people get to the privacy page from where they enter the site. Useful to see if some categories are getting more traffic than others, so that we can re-balance if, for example, we think that Privacy is not getting the attention we want it to.
- See how long people are staying on this page. What if the writing or infographic don't make sense to users? We can try and improve them so that users come away with a better understanding of privacy.
- How are users interacting with those circles? If they're not hovering over any of the circles, maybe we should make it auto-switch between them to draw the user's eye over. Or maybe if they're only hovering over the first three, we should make those first three the most important aspects of privacy to make sure they're seen.
The goal of Shape of the Web is (in my eyes) to educate users about the issues that the open internet faces today, and to help give them a framework for thinking about what the web is (it's hard to think about a thing if you don't know how it's "shaped"). All of these metrics help us improve the page's ability to convey information so we can better educate users.
You don't need a 3rd party to learn the order of pages you served to any given client. That one is so simple you only need 'grep' and the server log. (aggregation into whatever statistics you want to learn is a trivial exercise left for the reader)
> - See how long people are staying on this page.
The entire point is that you do not have a right to that information, other than what you can infer from the client later loading another page. Applying technical methods to gain access to private information like this simply makes you the the spy invading people's privacy. Worse, as most people do not understand these technical details, you are a eavesdropper who is preying on ignorance.
> so that users come away with a better understanding of privacy.
...while you simultaneously violate the same user's privacy. Do you seriously not understand that you're making the "We had to destroy the village in order to save it" style of ends-justify-the means argument that ignores how you've started to act like that which you are supposedly fighting against.
> hovering over
Again, the entire point is that you don't get to know that information. That is a perfect example of the type of data the privacy-focused people are trying to protect. We really don't give a damn if that information is useful; if you're recording anything beyond the HTTP requests you receive (the explicit request from the client), then you are the spy and therefore the enemy. If you want to understand how effective your pages are, find another way to deduce that information. This is why traditional businesses pay people to participate in focus groups, to name one example.
I also think that a pragmatic organization should focus on a few very important battles that it thinks it can win, rather than trying to fight everything in the name of ideology.
You don't need a third party analytics system for them.
And none of this information will ever be used it is just gathered and sent to a third party.
