Is it just me or is this a click-bait title with hollow content?
We ditched Google Analytics
11–20 of 273 posts
Re: We ditched Google Analytics
#12Yet they are still listed on Google search [ http://bit.ly/1ICwud0 ]. I guess it's easy to have principles when it doesn't cost you money.
This has nothing to do with search. This has 100% to do with site tracking with Google Analytics.
Re: We ditched Google Analytics
#13To any of the SpiderOak team: thank you.
It's more than just the tracking cookie, though. It's also about Google aggregating all its website data into a unified profile. The data they have on everyone is frightening—all because of free services like GA.
Re: We ditched Google Analytics
#14Yet they are still listed on Google search [ http://bit.ly/1ICwud0 ]. I guess it's easy to have principles when it doesn't cost you money.
I don't understand your complaint. 1) They freely admit that they use Google products, and 2) Google search is a way to be discovered by curious users. SpiderOak is looking to avoid giving excessive user data to Google, which is a totally separate issue.
Re: We ditched Google Analytics
#15Yet they are still listed on Google search [ http://bit.ly/1ICwud0 ]. I guess it's easy to have principles when it doesn't cost you money.
How exactly would they stop themselves from being listed on Google? A right to be forgotten request? Their decision was to ditch Google Analytics, not to disappear from the web.
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Re: We ditched Google Analytics
#16> Sadly, we didn’t like the answer to that question. “Yes, by using Google Analytics, we are furthering the erosion of privacy on the web.”
The only thing "wrong" with using an analytics service to better understand your customers is that it places all knowledge of visits, including ones that wished to be private, in a centralized location. This can be useful in providing correlation data across all visitors in aggregate, such as which browser you should make sure your site supports most of the time.
In other words, there exists some data in aggregate that is valuable to all of us, but the cost is a loss of privacy for smaller sets of personal data.
If individuals don't want certain behaviors analyzed by others, then they shouldn't use centralized services which exist outside their realm of control. These individuals would be better off using a "website" that is hosted by themselves, inside their own four walls, running on their own equipment. A simple way for SpiderOak to address this is to put their website on IPFS or something similar.
I appreciate the fact that SpiderOak is thinking about these things. It's important!
Re: We ditched Google Analytics
#17Yet they are still listed on Google search [ http://bit.ly/1ICwud0 ]. I guess it's easy to have principles when it doesn't cost you money.
How exactly would they stop themselves from being listed on Google? A right to be forgotten request? Their decision was to ditch Google Analytics, not to disappear from the web.
[deleted]
Re: We ditched Google Analytics
#18Why not move to push GA data server-side? Trivial to set-up, immune to adblockers affecting the completeness of data, prevents the write of tracking cookies, leaves data and utility of the GA dashboard mostly complete (loss of user client capabilities and some session-based metrics). This is the route I'm preferring to take (being applied this Christmas via https://pypi.python.org/pypi/pyga ). One may argue that Goog…
People don't care about the cookie or any of the details of the implementation. They care about being tracked across the whole internet. If you are still contributing to that then you are disrespecting your customers. I hope that I am not one of them.
Did you read my comment?
You will have no GA cookie from any of my sites, I am not recording client identifying things or capabilities. It is a server-side push of GA and avoids all client-side interactions.
It is merely, "A page has been viewed, this one: /foo/bar?bash".
There's nothing in there that is tracking you. I'm not even embracing the session management aspect.
I get to use the tool that is best-in-class, in a way that lacks capability to track you.
Re: We ditched Google Analytics
#19The irony for me is that I am mostly invisible to Google Analytics, and thus the companies that rely on GA, because I mostly browse with JavaScript disabled. (When I need JavaScript, I usually crank up an incognito instance of Chrome and close it immediately when done, so I'm mostly anonymous to GA even then.)
When they go "old fashioned" and datamine their web server logs, they uncloak me. :-/
Re: We ditched Google Analytics
#20I'm doing my part. I'm moving to DuckDuckGo for searching more and more. It's a process. Google does have better results. For work I still rely on Google, for private stuff I use https://duckduckgo.com/
And for the sake of ducks, I'm eating less meat as well. No more chicken - too much antibiotics, and as little meat as possible, only when it's worth it, so great taste and good quality.