11–16 of 16 posts
You may not need user tracking at all. You can track how many signups came from which domain by setting a cookie with the referrer and incrementing a count for that domain at signup. Here’s an interesting post about it https://doingdone.app/blog/building-a-startup-without-user-t...
For analytics try to use self-hosted solution or even rely on your existing logs (if a feature is hitting endpoint X and you want to know how frequently it is used you can just grep for that URL). If you really need to use a third-party, I'd prefer one where you pay for the service (MixPanel, etc) rather than a "free" one like Google Analytics. At least the paid one has less incentive to use the data for their own pu…
Do you have an opinion about situations where 'tracking' is really what is needed. For example, keeping track of a referral from a partner, so that you can pay them for converted customers?
If HTTP referrer isn't an option, a custom query parameter like ?referer=source_site is what I'd consider okay - it looks straightforward so someone can decide to remove it manually if they have a good reason to do so. I would avoid stuff like utm_ parameters as they just mean Google Analytics and not only is this blocked by default by my browser & DNS server it also means you don't care about my privacy and are happy for Google to track me (I never click on links in emails for this reason because they all got some kind of scummy shit to track me that involves a third-party).
I recall someone posting a privacy-friendly analytics tool on show HN a few months back, so you don’t have to roll your own.
The downside is that you lose GA’s insight into who your users are (gender, interests, age group...). But that is some seriously creepy stuff when you stop to think about it.
My anonymizer tool uses a bloom filter to determine which IP are addresses are unique, maintaining a semi-accurate unique visitor count. User agents and referrers are also anonymized.
My blog post explains this in more technical detail: https://www.jamieweb.net/blog/using-a-bloom-filter-to-anonym...
[1] https://gitlab.com/jamieweb/web-server-log-anonymizer-bloom-...