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We ditched Google Analytics

spideroak.com

71–80 of 273 posts

Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#71

An open-source, self-hostable solution providing 80% of common Google Analytics functionality seems doable to me. Is there anything out there in this realm? If not, why not?

http://snowplowanalytics.com/ is worth considering if you have larger volumes of traffic

Snowplow is great. Super scalable and they have instructions on how to host everything on your own AWS infrastructure.

Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#72
At Cloudron, our vision is to allow companies to host their own apps easily. We dogfood and don't use Google. We don't use analytics on our website (a conscious decision). Our emails are based on IMAP servers and we use thunderbird. We selfhost everything other than email (which is on gandi).

We just entered private beta yesterday - https://cloudron.io/blog/2015-12-07-private-beta.html

Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#73
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without any "client identifying things" how would GA be able to chain several page hits into a session then? That is, do basic visits vs. hits split. If you are in fact anonymizing everything about a client as you claim you do, then it won't be able to. Unless, of course, you are feeding GA some opaque client ID that you then internally map to and from actual clients that hit your server. However something tells me t…

In the test I've done, sending no session/user data over, I lose all sense of a "session". But I do retain insight into what content has been viewed, how much, what is rising and falling, etc. The question really is what info are you really reporting on? AdBlockers make us blind and tracking is horrible, but I get to have a far more complete view over the simple stuff Urchin used to be great at.

Ah, so you are passing some client IDs over the GA after all. An IP address perhaps? You know that's a leading question, right?

Incidentally, I ran similar experiment with gaug.es few years ago - pulled on their tracking API from our server side. While it worked as expected, these sort of shenanigans are good for only one thing - hiding the fact that you are using 3rd party analytics from your visitors.

On a more general note - the thing is that you either care about other people's privacy or you don't. It's not a grayscale, it's binary. And if you do, there's no place for GA in the picture.

Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#75
post #43

Not strictly on topic so I apologise if this is unwanted but I thought I'd share my experience with SpiderOak in case anyone here was thinking of purchasing one of their plans. In February SpiderOak dropped its pricing to $12/month for 1TB of data. Having several hundred gigabytes of photos to backup I took advantage and bought a year long subscription ($129). I had access to a symmetric gigabit fibre connection so I…

Many of these types of services seem to intentionally cap upload speeds to reduce their potential storage liability (since they're likely over-selling storage to be able to offer 1 TB for $12 with the level of redundancy, staffing costs, etc, needed). I wonder if that is happening in this specific case? Although if it were the case the vendor should still be honest about it. Just saying they limit uploads to 2 Mbps i…

It's definitely possible to offer that on a monthly basis if you model that each customer stays for 36-39 months. Also, I doubt that they are using replicated storage, but are using erasure coding instead. Also, they dedupe before upload, so more cost savings there.

Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have a look at piwik: http://piwik.org/

I don't recommend Piwik. Using MD5 for passwords in 2015 is beyond irresponsible. https://github.com/piwik/piwik/blob/7f375924db9328f20a0b7cb1... https://github.com/piwik/piwik/blob/6846145992278b52a2a35a8f...

[deleted]

Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#77
I don't get it. SpiderOak states that they dropped GA because it furthers "the erosion of privacy on the web.”, but then they just started tracking in house.

How is tracking in house more private than GA? The user is still being tracked.

Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been running a blocker to block GA and other junk on my PC, but I imagine I'm in a statistically insignificant minority. And I still can't block them on my iPhone unless I disable JavaScript entirely (though I'm running iOS 9, I'm not able to install a blocker for some reason; I guess Apple arbitrarily doesn't support them on my older iPhone model).

>I guess Apple arbitrarily doesn't support them on my older iPhone It's not arbitrary - it requires a 64 bit CPU (of which Apple has now shipped 3 generations of).

Ah, is that the differentiator? I see. Still strikes me as somewhat arbitrary, though - is content blocking such a strenuous task that it requires a 64-bit CPU? Wouldn't using a blocker cause the CPU to do less work in most cases since it doesn't have to download so many ad media files or execute as much JavaScript?

Yeah, I guess it's just time to get a friggin' new phone already, but this one ain't broke yet, ya know?

Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have a look at piwik: http://piwik.org/

I don't recommend Piwik. Using MD5 for passwords in 2015 is beyond irresponsible. https://github.com/piwik/piwik/blob/7f375924db9328f20a0b7cb1... https://github.com/piwik/piwik/blob/6846145992278b52a2a35a8f...

Unbelievable. Unsalted MD5, no less. There's an issue to fix this that's been open for seven years! https://github.com/piwik/piwik/issues/5728

Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#80
post #3

> Like lots of other companies with high traffic websites, we are a technology company; one with a deep team of software developer expertise. It took us only a few weeks to write our home-brew analytics package. I'm a little curious why they decided to go this route instead of using one of the open-source solutions. Aren't there good solutions to this problem already?

I was curious as well and just assumed the usual NIH (not invented here) syndrome. Web analytics was so mature before Google bought Urchin and turned it into Google analytics. Since that time countless open source projects have sprung up (pwik was the first that came to mind). Google for open source alternatives brings up thousands of pages of projects.

Writing your own is easy for the basic stuff. When you want to move beyond the basics, as Spider Oak will find, it becomes much more difficult.

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