How about we just stop letting them steal from us?

cough bullshit cough, The statically probability that you would generate an actual AND proper tracking code that also just happens to be used by a site that shares all you code is less than can be described. Your team got caught outsourcing jobs to code copy/paste firms.

"Wow, what a coincidence... we just happened to randomly generate a google analytics ID that was the exact same as the one used on a scratchpad plugin that we copied the code from..."

If only calculating the odds of this were as fun as 2048 we'd have a bunch of different solutions on the frontpage of HN for the next 2 weeks!

And wouldn't it make more sense to create a test GA account and just use the ID from there for everything, instead of generating randomly each time?

I don't see any reason for the guy to lie. He could just have not responded, or quietly changed the code, but he came to the blog and posted a publicly viewable comment about it ... maybe his diagnosis is wrong and something different is happening, but I'm very willing to believe it was an honest mistake given the circumstances.

I don't think he's lying, but I do think he's mistaken. They probably do generate random codes, but this was not one of them. It looks/smells like a copy/paste.

That aside, though, why not just create a different Google Analytics account and use that one consistently for testing?

This is exactly the reason they responded. By changing the code quietly, they would implicate themselves. An official PR statement like this is obligatory.

What is more probable, that they a lying, or that the random generator generated not a single code that matched, which is very(!) improbable by itself, but two codes that belong to the same account, generated at the same iteration.

This is not an official PR statement, it's an engineer responding at 11 PM (MLB is based on the east coast) with the information he/she had available. I don't think there's an intent to decieve here, just a mistaken guess of the probabilities involved. Hanlon's razor applies.

He has no idea that his team is a bunch of lazy outsourcers. He knows, he is just confused.

Yeah, it could be their CI doesn't generate random codes voor javascript code or something...

The thing that most inclines me to believe it is that, by my reading of the article (which admittedly might be reading to much into it), only a subset of MLB pages are using the ID. Hard to imagine why that would be the case if someone was simply copying code wholesale from the "victim" site.

And then you can do nothing about it because MLB.com has outsourced their site and they stole your analytics codes. I guess you could change them, but still the question is: are companies that outsource to shady firms liable for copyright/damages that will result from said decision.