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by neilv 697 days ago
Why would a .gov Web site like this have dependencies on, and information leaks to, googletagmanager.com and crazyegg.com?
1 comments

Maybe I'm dense but why would you expect a government service to not use common tooling available to them?
I think access to government services is an impoetant part of democracy. Because you have no alternative, they should be Held to higher Standards of privacy. Google doesn't need to know everything.
This is how you increase the cost of government services. Though it would be nice if over time the government developed their own alternatives.
How would removing tag manager make this website more expensive to run?
It would require a dev every time someone wants to track something new.

It would require rerunning ci/cd, testing, qa to bake it in, in case it fails and breaks something.

All of that is hours of resources which translates directly into money.

With GTM, planning still occurs, organization, but someone can try something, have a debugger to iterate on, once done, hit publish. No need for dev, testing, qa, ci/cd time, breaking, reverting, etc.

It would be much more difficult to understand what users are doing with the products and prioritize development.
Can you give an example?
Third party services that remain involved aren't "tooling". They're part of the final site, dragging in all of that terrible behavior of the surveillance industry. So yes it's reasonable to ask why one should have to suffer that to access a public service and/or by government requirement. If we had a US GDPR and some societal expectation of privacy letting us be reasonably sure those vendors were prohibited from creating surveillance dossiers on us it would be more reasonable, but US "governance" is actually skewed the exact opposite way.