We have a number of sites in the UK for reporting crime which are supposed to be anonymous. The best known is Crimestoppers UK [1] which tells you you can "Contact us anonymously with information about crime". All these sites use Google Analytics and some also add Facebook tracking codes too.
None of these sites point out that Google, Facebook, etc can easily ID you and while you may be anonymous to the site operator you aren't truly anonymous. I've contacted Crimestoppers and the local police to ask about this and got nowhere. The bottom line seems to be that the police and Crimestoppers have absolute unshakable faith in Google and are comfortable outsourcing crime victims' privacy to an American advertising company.
I developed a very similar form for one of these sites. We were requested to and implemented features for safeguarding anonymity, like stripping information from web logs. The organisation insisted on including Google Analytics on the anonymous form submission page; I repeatedly made it clear that this was an awful idea, that this completely defeated anonymity, and that if usage data was required we could collect it in some other way. Unfortunately, I don't think they really care.
Security around this so-called anonymous data was thoroughly lax, and eventually someone is literally going to be murdered as a result of it.
None of these sites point out that Google, Facebook, etc can easily ID you and while you may be anonymous to the site operator you aren't truly anonymous. I've contacted Crimestoppers and the local police to ask about this and got nowhere. The bottom line seems to be that the police and Crimestoppers have absolute unshakable faith in Google and are comfortable outsourcing crime victims' privacy to an American advertising company.
[1] https://crimestoppers-uk.org/give-information/give-informati...