Here it is…

George Carlin: 1937-2008

Coming back from taping the State of the County address, I needed to stop for dinner.

I passed by a Checkers, which is a fast-food place that has only a few places on Long Island.

One part of me wanted to partake in Checkers.

The rational part of me wanted to keep driving because Checkers isn’t worth stopping in Central Islip.

Rational mind wins out, and Joe gets Chinese in a neighborhood that’s not Central Islip.

Was walking into a high school gymnasium filled with man high school freinds.  They’re all lined up, sitting down against the wall.  The coach gets everyone up against the wall to do jumping jacks.  I notice one other kid and myself are the only ones in my area that actually finish the 20 jumping jacks.

For some reason, I know this situation isn’t right and I recognize this is a dream, and I somehow shock myself into waking up.

Lucid dreaming is fun.

About a month ago, the web counter and stat tracker for this site went under. No hit counter, no log of IPs, no search engine stats, nothin’.

A friend of mine once mentioned Google Analytics for use at our workplace as a way of tracking site views and such. So, I decided to try this out.

Now, being the (bored) geek that I am, I peruse license agreements before accepting them, and looking at this particular license agreement gave me pause when I came to this section (emphasis mine)…

3. MEMBER ACCOUNT, PASSWORD, AND SECURITY . To register for the Service, You must complete the registration process by providing Google with current, complete and accurate information as prompted by the registration form, including Your e-mail address (username) and password. You shall protect your passwords and take full responsibility for Your own, and third party, use of Your accounts. You are solely responsible for any and all activities that occur under Your Account. You agree to notify Google immediately upon learning of any unauthorized use of Your Account or any other breach of security. From time to time, Google’s (or its wholly-owned subsidiaries’) support staff may log in to the Service under Your customer password in order to maintain or improve service, including to provide You assistance with technical or billing issues. You hereby acknowledge and consent to such access.

As a user of the search engine, gmail and blogger (all of which use a single Google account), this statement was the deal-breaker. The agreement doesn’t say that support will be going into my account after first contacting me or only when I request it. “From time to time” could mean tomorrow for all I know, and what’s more, the agreement has no mention of how I’ll know support was in my account.

What makes giving Google carte blanche access to the account a dangerous risk is that the credentials I would use to access the analytics service are the exact same credentials I use to access my gmail account and my blogger account. The wording of the agreement seems to indicate that Google support would actually log into your account using your Google account username and password in order to provide support.  So, should I agree to the User Agreement, I essentially say “yes, because I agree to have your software count web page hits and usage data on my site, you can fully access my gmail account and one of my blogs.”

As someone whose job entails providing support to users for their Active Directory user accounts, logging in as someone else is only done with the users permission, and I always change the password to allow myself temporary access.  GA’s license agreement does not specify in what way access would occur, and I’m not going to assume that the access I’m granting to Google is not going to be somehow abused by a technician with a vendetta or massive indifference.  I’m looking at this with the worst possible scenario in mind, that being that there is a Google support technician out there that has access to either user’s passwords or the ability to change passwords, or has some other kind of “skeleton key”-type access into any arbitrary account and also has malicious intent. Should it ever come down to a breach of privacy occurring and some unfortunate Google user taking legal action against Google, Google’s lawyers would simply deny accountability by flashing this license agreement all over the courtroom, then take the rest of the day off.

I sent Google a note via their Privacy Form on 8/10/2007 and this is what I wrote…

Hello…

I have a concern about Google Analytics. While reading the User Agreement for Google Analytics, I came across this statement in the 3rd section:

“3. MEMBER ACCOUNT, PASSWORD, AND SECURITY . [...] From time to time, Google’s (or its wholly-owned subsidiaries’) support staff may log in to the Service under Your customer password in order to maintain or improve service, including to provide You assistance with technical or billing issues. You hereby acknowledge and consent to such access.”

Since my Analytics account has the same credentials as other Google services I use (GMail, blogger), this essentially means that I am granting Google support carte blanche access to all of my Google services and the information contained therein. This is of great concern to me. Could you clarify the access that support has in regards to accessing my account, and give an overview as to what your procedures are in support actually accessing my account? Thank you.”

One minute later, I got a useless auto-reply which contained no useful information.

6 days later, I got no response from Google.

So, in light of all this, I won’t be using Google Analytics, simply on the basis that their license agreement is either unintentionally and poorly worded or grants them access to too much information.

If I’ve somehow got this wrong, let me know.

I started reading this book, and I just finished chapter 6 wherein the main character is pissed because he just found out the woman he had sex with was an ugly 50-year-old prostitute with no teeth.

This book is AWESOME! So true to real life!

So I dreamt that I had a third nipple located on my stomach a few inches off-center.  My friends laughed at me for it, but I took it in stride.

I have no idea why my dreams keep involving nipples.

After one week of bedside reading, I’ve finished this 278 page tome of awesome.

Drew Curtis’s book, which details his observed trends of Mass Media, is a great read for anyone who has wondered (among other things) why there’s always an article about black Friday and cyber Monday around the same time every year even though the articles from year to year don’t really change all that much.

As a paying member of fark.com, I highly recommend this book to anyone that can read and those who can’t read but have someone they can pay to read for them.

State: Balance Due: $7. 

One of the strippers is NOT getting a tip. 

I know it’s been said before by many others before me, but isn’t it strange that an athletic event is being hosted by a corporation responsible for making many people obese?

Federal: $644.00

Time to pick up some strippers.