Why Homolog.us Avoids Google Analytics, OpenID and Other 'Cool' Silicon Valley

We do not like you to get spied upon for reading our commentaries, and we realized that farming out our log in or web tracking system to ‘do not evil’ companies would have done exactly that. Yes, it is expensive for us to maintain our own version of piwik, but we are ready to go to that extent to

Details here.

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We checked hundreds of university websites, blogs and bioinformatics websites, and found every single one to go for the easy solution of sending your private information to spying agencies. Here are few examples -

GMOD - UA-33095045-1

Biostarts - UA-101522-12

seqanswers - UA-2960471-1

Titus Brown - UA-32627666-1

Getting Genetics Done - UA-8298649-1

Openhelix - UA-972186-1

ENSEMBL - yes (http://uswest.ensembl.org/minified/a7b8ca95be62025e2332583d398555c5.js)

yeast genome database - UA-440742-1

Stanford university - UA-1860414-1

Harvard university - UA-2923555-1

Cornell university - UA-1628162-1

So, if you go from Harvard’s webpage to Titus Brown’s blog and then to Biostars, every move of you is trackable by outside agents via google analytics and backdoor. If that kind of tracking bothers you, please ask those webmasters to remove google analytics. Installing and maintaining piwik is very easy.

You can find out whether a website is sending private information to google and spying agencies by viewing the page source of those web sites and looking for this block of code -

`

var _gaq = _gaq

[];

_gaq.push([‘_setAccount’, ‘UA-101522-12’]);

_gaq.push([‘_setDomainName’, ‘biostars.org’]);

_gaq.push([‘_trackPageview’]);

(function () {

var ga = document.createElement(‘script’);

ga.type = ‘text/javascript’;

ga.async = true;

ga.src = (‘https:’ == document.location.protocol ? ‘https://ssl’ : ‘http://www’) + ‘.google-analytics.com/ga.js’;

var s = document.getElementsByTagName(‘script’)[0];

s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s);

})();

`