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We ditched Google Analytics

spideroak.com

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Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#111

Post by username223 »

jdmichal wrote: post #95
vermontdevil wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does the adblock/ublock etc block this as well? Am looking to use this in lieu of Google Analytics.

Self-hosted means that it will be served from your own servers, and thereby your own domain. So unless your domain is on a block list, it will be loaded. EDIT: Sorry, I've been dealing with uBlock Matrix for too long, and forgot how advanced the other blockers pattern matching is. See the many responses to this for better information.

It will probably take awhile, but trackers will move to aggregating log files, and blockers will move to TOR. And the arms race continues...

Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#112

Post by Veratyr »

bluedino wrote: post #89
Veratyr wrote: 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…

>> my laptop was easily capable of hashing and encrypting the data much faster than the network was capable of handling it You are assuming that you are the only one using that uplink and that server

Updated my comment:

> easily capable of hashing and encrypting the data much faster than SpiderOak was handling it

I can believe that there was upstream congestion somewhere outside my network (speeds to Google, Amazon indicated that there were no issues inside) or that their server was overloaded but the engineer who investigated seemed to attribute it to the client:

> Additional changes to storage network configuration will not improve the situation much. There is an overhead limitation when the client encrypts, deduplicates, and compresses the files you are uploading"

Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#113

Post by sarciszewski »

rplnt wrote: post #33
eponeponepon wrote: post #29

It took us only a few weeks to write our home-brew analytics package. Nothing super fancy yet now we have an internal dashboard that shows the entire company much of what we used analytics for anyway - and with some nice integration with some of our other systems too. I never quite grasp how the above isn't just a matter of intuition to anyone working in the tech sector. Google Analytics thrives on developers' lazine…

Aren't there self-hosted analytics anyway? Piwik[1] comes to mind first, but I'm sure there are many. 1. https://piwik.org/

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10697045

Piwik is still using (unsalted) MD5 for passwords in 2015, and probably will still be using unsalted MD5 in 2016.

Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#114

Post by [deleted] »

bluedino wrote: post #89
Veratyr wrote: 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…

>> my laptop was easily capable of hashing and encrypting the data much faster than the network was capable of handling it You are assuming that you are the only one using that uplink and that server

[deleted]

Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#116

Post by stonemetal »

sghiassy wrote: post #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.

With it in house it is under their control: they can anonymize it, not collect certain information, they can't cross index it with your traffic from other sites, etc.

Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#117

Post by pg1 »

dataewan wrote: post #21
nateberkopec wrote: post #2

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

+ 1 for snowplow. We been using it for more than a year now with high traffic sites and it's working great.

Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#118

Post by jdmichal »

jrgv wrote: post #106
jdmichal wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Self-hosted means that it will be served from your own servers, and thereby your own domain. So unless your domain is on a block list, it will be loaded. EDIT: Sorry, I've been dealing with uBlock Matrix for too long, and forgot how advanced the other blockers pattern matching is. See the many responses to this for better information.

The EasyPrivacy block list contains an entry that will block the piwik.js file. Of course, when you're self-hosting, it's trivial to serve that file with a non-default name.

That's an interesting choice. I mean, it's not like you can hide from the web server that you are making the request. But then again, I'm assuming -- by the sheer necessity of having a JS file -- that they are collecting some additional metrics not available to the server in the request.

Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#119

Post by pdkl95 »

jdmichal wrote: post #95
vermontdevil wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does the adblock/ublock etc block this as well? Am looking to use this in lieu of Google Analytics.

Self-hosted means that it will be served from your own servers, and thereby your own domain. So unless your domain is on a block list, it will be loaded. EDIT: Sorry, I've been dealing with uBlock Matrix for too long, and forgot how advanced the other blockers pattern matching is. See the many responses to this for better information.

(my apologies for the tone - I have edited the post to try to keep it purely fact based)

From EasyPrivacy[1]

    /piwik-$domain=~piwik.org
    /piwik.$script,domain=~piwik.org
    /piwik.php
    /piwik/js/*$domain=~piwik.org
    /piwik1.
    /piwik2.js
    /piwik_
    /piwikapi.js
    /piwikC_
    /piwikTracker.
This doesn't include any renamed versions, nor does it include the numerous domain-specific variations.

[1] https://easylist-downloads.adblockplus.org/easyprivacy.txt

Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#120

Post by cm2187 »

Albright wrote: post #61
cm2187 wrote: post #26

The other thing is that google analytics is on many adblockers lists, precisely for that reason. As adblockers are getting widespread, the analytics is going blind.

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 could install an adblocker on iOS9, and you can customize the block list.

I don't think you are a minority. I understand adblocking usage is around 20%-ish now.

What I don't understand is people who use adblockers but still login to their google account on chrome. It sorts of defeat the purpose...

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