Interesting, the 'especially from government employees' bit feels like a very US-centric reaction. In many other places in the world people just kinda trust their governments. I have no problem with any European government collecting analytics data.
I disagree, as always the US is just 10 years ahead (so it will come to us as well, just later) and there are numerous law initiatives that show to what extent your privacy and freedom of expression is a concern of politicians.
>I disagree, as always the US is just 10 years ahead
At the same time the US is 10 years behind. GDPR is far ahead of anything the US has. Gun control is 50+ years ahead and lets not try to count years in social security nets or healthcare for the non-rich (or health in itself for that matter). In average I'd say the US is behind the curve and falling further by the day, especially now China has become a semi-great soon to be superpower.
Yeah it’s just analytics data. I trust every shady website I’ve ever visited with what I click on, why should a government service (provided by the government to me in the public good) be any different? What could they possibly get from that the census bureau doesn’t have? The tax authority?
Europe has a long and recent history of not being worthy of trust. Francoist Spain just ended in 1975. We had communist Europe fairly recently. The Nazis weren’t that long ago. We’ve had actual genocide in Europe within the past 30 years. It’s a mistake to “trust” any government beyond what can be immediately audited and verified. However to your point about analytics: that’s pretty benign unless those analytics are personally identifiable.
