There's a lot of people who really don't like gov.uk, and I don't understand why. I've always been able to find the information I'm looking for quickly - faster than any other Government website I'm forced to use.
I would assume Politics. From a technical side they're great.
However what is happening there basically taking work away from big outsourcing contracts(Lots of easy money involved) with companies like Capgmini. Upsetting the people in those companies, and civil servants who want to eventually work with those companies. These companies generally hires ex-civil servants they used to work with.
They're also taking away responsibility from the individual departments also upsetting empire building civil servants, even if GDS is doing a better job. At the moment there's talk of breaking up gds and giving services back to the departments who did a terrible job in the first place.
So you get a lot of drama and arguments involved, and "House of Cards" style schemes against them to try to get rid of them. Frankly with all the money and self interest against them, i've surprised they've lasted this long.
It's rare for me to say David Cameron and his friends did anything right, but this was one initiative that did make the world a better place. GDS wouldn't have been around this long without significant support from the very top. It is telling that a change of political fortunes will likely coincide with GDS losing primacy.
It was very hyped when often all it's done is provided a better-looking menu page - the page you land on looks great, but once you click through to the actual functionality you're back at the same page that used to be there. And that results in an even less consistent experience than before - before at least all the HMRC pages were on the HMRC site and looked the same, all the FCO pages were on the FCO site and looked the same... now you click a menu link on gov.uk and you might get an old-HMRC-style page, an old-FCO-style page, or something else.
I mean don't get me wrong, it's fine as far as it goes. It does look nice. But it doesn't make the actual functionality noticeably more usable, so it's hard to see what all the fuss is about.
To be clear, we’re not doing that work. We’re helping the departments build their own services with both patterns and standards, and assess each service before it goes live for quality. You can see what you need to do to meet the service assessment standard at https://www.gov.uk/service-manual/service-standard
Lots of information that used to be on government sites was removed.
They added Google Analytics everywhere. Even on the pages where you fill in your taxes or apply for a passport. Google does not need to know my tax details. Google shouldn't know my tax details. Since Google isn't even a UK company the UK government doesn't even have legal authority over what Google does with the information they now hold about UK citizens taxes.
Google breaking its contracts over Analytics Premium would severely negatively affect it, given that it's a product a number of very large companies and organisations use.
The NSA will just install their funnel somewhere new and off you go.
Browsing privacy is not just about the intentions of the two parties talking to each other but everyone one holding the wire plus everyone the other sites invites to listen in on your private exchange.
I don't think the NSA snooping on Google Analytics should really be in your threat model when looking at a UK government site. They could just ask GCHQ.
All user data is anonymised before sending to Google. I believe we strip the last two blocks off the IP address before sending it over. We use the analytics to inform choices we make - our 3rd design principle is to ‘design with data’ https://www.gov.uk/design-principles#third . Finally, on projects where it’s critical that any data doesn’t go out of the UK like Verify we run our own instances of analytics software.
>I believe we strip the last two blocks off the IP address before sending it over.
No you don't. You don't "send" anything over to Google. The users browser does because loading a gov.uk page also loads a Google Analytic script straight from google-analytics.com. You don't have the power to prevent the users IP being sent to Google in that situation and it's worrying that you think you do.
Additionally, focusing on the IP address seems rather silly when a much more accurate tracking cookie is being used.
