Topic: Bitpay and google/NSA (Read 474 times)

Ty, to the best of my knowledge, I don't get any googleanalytics domain up when paying with BitPay, but they seem to rely on some google scripts from the sites mentioned in my first post.

I know google analytics is a powerful tool, but services that care about users privacy, I don't think should use google analytics.

Google Analytics gives webmasters traffic statistics.  I think one problem is, when they are selling advertising, people want the stats to come from a trustworthy 3rd party like Google.   If they are relying on local metrics, it's trivial to cook the books.
You have a strong point about this being a bad match for a site like bitpay and other btc related sites.

When using Bitpay, I see that their site requests to run script from google.com and ajax.googleapis.com. I'm using NOScript wich notifies me about this.

Why does Bitpay not simply rely on providing data from their own servers? I find it hard to believe that Google/NSA is not profiling all crypto usage online, why give them a helping hand like this?

To my understanding, this can be blocked on a user level, using something like NOScript and probably other similar software, however - when giving up your data like this, then Google can track you over a whole hostload of services, and they can know your usage patterns and this will most likely be provided to entities you're not interested in having it.

Are there others that are concerned about these things? Should we write Bitpay about it? Of course, Bitpay could just remove those external scripts, and still cooperate with NSA et al. behind the scenes and claim they're not, but I do not understand why a business uses third party services to provide various functionality that they could've served themselves, eps. not so when they're essentially giving the usage pattern for their users away for free.

And for those who think it's not a big deal; the Snowden revelations have clearly showed that privacy online are attacked from all ends at the same time.

If you're a webmaster, these things are worth thinking of - why give up user data to third party services, and can you trust that the third party service will never serve you malicious content and thus hurting your users?

What do you all think about this ? Should we just use stuff like NoScript on an individual basis, or should we contact these services and state our concerns ?