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Show HN: Vince – A self hosted alternative to Google Analytics

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Re: Show HN: Vince – A self hosted alternative to Google Analytics

#51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Since IP addresses are considered personal data under GDPR, we anonymize them using a one-way cryptographic hash function. Um... hashing IPv4 addresses, even with salt, does literally nothing to anonymise (assuming the output space is at least ~32 bits, which I think is safe to assume): they’ll still be PII. IPv6 addresses I’m not so confident about; maybe it would be sufficient for some parts, but it’s definitely…

One way if you have a salt? Enumerating won’t help, you need to know the salt, which gets deleted. That said, the whole IP thing is weird to me. Not only are we allowed to log IPs directly for security reasons, we even *have* to log IPs in certain cases (newsletter subscriptions).

> That said, the whole IP thing is weird to me. Not only are we allowed to log IPs directly for security reasons, we even have to log IPs in certain cases (newsletter subscriptions).

The point of designating something as PII isn't that we then _never_ store or use it, it's to carefully consider if we actually need it or not (and what protections we can add for the values we do need to store/use).

We're meant to stop the practice of just collecting and storing all data, without consideration for the harms that causes.

Re: Show HN: Vince – A self hosted alternative to Google Analytics

#52
post #23

Looks exactly like plausible, may be change the ui a bit to avoid legal issues.

I was going to say that it looks exactly like BeamAnalytics, and now I'm confused to who's copying who...

I'm wondering when copying becomes just following industry best practices...

Twitter, Threads, Mastodon, Blusky all look the same. Project management apps all reuse the same UI patterns. The "AI" logo looked pretty much the same for all companies for a while. Video sharing websites all use YouTube's layout. Forums like Reddit and HN share quite a lot in their looks.

If you want to display website analytics, you will want to show the most important metrics at a glance, you'll need graphs showing visitors over time, top sources and pages... There is only so much you can do to display those and have users understand what's going on on your website.

Re: Show HN: Vince – A self hosted alternative to Google Analytics

#54
Code quality is pristine, really great job! I see that you've used protocol buffers, can you expand on why? I am aware of the benefits it offers but I think it adds a bit of mental overhead initially due to it being an additional type system you have to understand.

Also why are you using pebble exactly? I was interested in seeing how you're managing your geo databases because that's usually the most mind numbing part of handling analytics if your cloud provider doesn't add that information into the request header already. However, I can't understand why you'd use pebble over something like sqlite.

Re: Show HN: Vince – A self hosted alternative to Google Analytics

#56
post #26

My go-to self hosted GA alternative is goatcounter https://www.goatcounter.com . It would be interesting to know what advantages it has over it.

Does it allow filtering visited page list by a specific referrer and vice verse?

Re: Show HN: Vince – A self hosted alternative to Google Analytics

#58
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was going to say that it looks exactly like BeamAnalytics, and now I'm confused to who's copying who...

Because everyone is using: https://tailwindui.com/components#product-marketing

It's not just the looks that are the same. The UX / mechanics are way too similar too, e.g. how you can apply filters (by URL, by referrer, by browser, etc.) to narrow down the stats view.
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