[46Bit]

Umm, GOV.UK uses Google Analytics, Fastly CDN, AWS containers, and I believe is developing an app.

(I worked at GDS until two years ago.)

[Aeolun]

Like he said:

> a stronghold of common sense and decency

I get that OP was going for something else but…

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with those things when in the right hands.

[arpinum]

gov.uk is not a monolith, different departments can make different decisions. There is no mandate for AWS containers or Fastly CDN.

[switch007]

They have to provision from a market place of approve service though right?

[sonthonax]

They tend to use the tools provided by Government Digital Services.

[nonrandomstring]

Indeed, but everything still works for me even though much of that stuff is blackholed here. These are common efficiencies (mistakes on my opinion fwiw) and hopefully we can further improve data-leakage and bring even more things properly back in-house.

Not to be too gushing or naive, I am quite aware that in the UK we recently "sold" big chunks of GCHQ to Amazon, so I'm not all wide eyed that parts of our government IT aren't idiots.

[djhn]

Sold parts of GCHQ? Could you elaborate? That sounds rather bad.

[pjc50]

Everyone uses Google Analytics. I don't find it particularly high up any list of real worries.

[Gud]

I don’t.

I despise Google and what they became and so should you.

Maybe my 10 visits a day webpage is an anomaly, and I’m truly the only one not using Google analytics - Still, don’t pretend Google analytics is used by everyone.

[ekianjo]

Why does the government need to send its data to google exactly?

[allan_s]

French government websites use matomo if i m not mistaken

[dazc]

A lot of people use google analytics for no logical reason what soever though. Typical use case for a small to medium website seems to be a list of most visited pages.

[tannhaeuser]

GA and external CDNs require cookie banner/consent under GDPR (which is still valid in UK AFAIK). So that alone should be reason enough to avoid it.

But you can never be sure: very recently, I'm seeing (unnecessary) popups coming up informing me about the site not using cookies! To make up for the phantom pain of not having one in EU where "real" sites do have cookie dialogs? The web and its self-referential UI idioms have become a strange place indeed.

[dalbasal]

IDK if those are, in themselves, indicators. The idea is not purity. The idea is for technical common sense to win over sales/consultant-led architecture.

[ksec]

>(I worked at GDS until two years ago.)

If you could tell, why did you leave?

[PaulHoule]

It's the HTML forms that are good and Angular, React and all that which are bad.

[bzmrgonz]

I wonder what technology they are using to wrangle these forms... I remember reading an article a few days ago concerning vuejs project to do something similar.

[bitcharmer]

Why does that matter?