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We ditched Google Analytics

spideroak.com

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Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#161

Post by huhtenberg »

buro9 wrote: post #94
huhtenberg wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 gen…

No. I am not passing IP. I am not passing a client-id. I am not passing any kind of correlation identifier from which a session can be inferred or created. I am not passing user-agent information. I am not passing a cookie ID. I am only passing a page view event. "Page /foo/bar?bash has been viewed". Take a look here: https://code.google.com/p/serversidegoogleanalytics/ Tell me where in that example (mine is similar)…

I don't understand why you bother with GA then.

Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#162

Post by toomuchtodo »

res0nat0r wrote: post #152
toomuchtodo wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if they are selling 1TB of storage, shouldn't we get 1TB of storage? You do, they're just not allowing you to store it in 24 hours. Some services (Backblaze, if I recall) allow you to ship a drive to get around this limitation. Notice that all services do this? If you can do better, build one! Prepare to go broke from the peak bandwidth requirements you'll need to build your networking architecture to support such…

Sounds like an upload cap speed should be stated somewhere, at least in a FAQ then yes?

I agree, it should be disclosed upfront.

Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#163

Post by tux3 »

Albright wrote: post #53
rplnt wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Unsurprisingly, Wikipedia has a list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_web_analytics_software

Wikipedia's love of lists is absolutely amazing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lists_of_lists

Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#164

Post by oldmanjay »

pdkl95 wrote: post #101
jessaustin wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being paid for doing work by those who need the work done is the opposite of "extracting rent".

Being paid for doing work has nothing to do with extracting rent , which is the practice of inserting yourself as a middleman so other people have to pay you "rent"[1] where none should be required. The entire idea behind writing a Service as a Software Substitute[2] is about extracting rent. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking [2] http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-se...

I feel like someone needs to rewrite Stallman's missives to eliminate the term redefinition and the connotation management. His usage of these rhetorical techniques is far too ham-handed to be persuasive to those who aren't already convinced, even when his message is important.

Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#166

Post by ufmace »

JupiterMoon wrote: post #9
buro9 wrote: post #6

Why 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.

Except that basically nobody cares about "being tracked across the whole internet", as shown by GA, Facebook, etc being on virtually every popular website and nobody noticing or caring at all. If you care enough to make even the most trivial change in behavior, then you're optimistically 1 in 1000.

Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#167

Post by buro9 »

huhtenberg wrote: post #161
buro9 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. I am not passing IP. I am not passing a client-id. I am not passing any kind of correlation identifier from which a session can be inferred or created. I am not passing user-agent information. I am not passing a cookie ID. I am only passing a page view event. "Page /foo/bar?bash has been viewed". Take a look here: https://code.google.com/p/serversidegoogleanalytics/ Tell me where in that example (mine is similar)…

I don't understand why you bother with GA then.

That's OK. It wasn't a requirement of my system.

Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#168

Post by cm2012 »

fenomas wrote: post #141
beerbajay wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google Analytics thrives on developers' laziness in my opinion. It's almost never "developers" who are deciding to use GA; it's middle managers or marketing departments.

Isn't GA's main draw its close integration with adwords and whatnot? The dashboard and UI seem pretty clearly aimed at someone who needs to manage their spending on google marketing services, not on someone who needs to count pageviews. So it's not hard to imagine marketing wanting it; presumably it provides them a lot of value that wouldn't be easy to recreate in-house.

My experience with in-house recreations of off the shelf solutions is disappointing at best.

Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#170

Post by Someone1234 »

sarciszewski wrote: post #140
etjossem wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is pretty bad. Piwik could be a high value target depending on the nature of the site it is used to analyze. I can't believe unsalted MD5 is "by design" ( https://github.com/piwik/piwik/issues/8753 ).

https://theintercept.com/2014/02/18/snowden-docs-reveal-cove... Considering Piwik is used by the GCHQ, I find it hilarious.

They're using an open source analytics software package to analyse the very data it was designed to analyse.

I don't find it using poorly implemented hashing in the administrative interface to be at all relevant to what they're doing, or why they shouldn't be using it.

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