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We ditched Google Analytics

spideroak.com

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Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#191

Post by etjossem »

Someone1234 wrote: post #170
sarciszewski wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Information on who visits WikiLeaks - and what they read and upload - is an incredibly high value target. I don't see how you can argue otherwise, when Britain's top intel agency has an expensive line item in their budget just to get at that info.

Given these known security flaws, it's not a stretch to assume anyone who can see the GCHQ's Piwik server can have that data too, regardless of whether they are authorized.

See below for a small preview of what an attacker could exfiltrate (dissident IPs redacted for a reason):

https://firstlook.org/wp-uploads/sites/1/2014/02/piwik2.png

While we're talking about poor security practices: the privileged username in the screenshot is apparently still the default ("admin"), so I hope the password isn't still "changeMe" ... http://piwik.org/faq/how-to/faq_191/

Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#192

Post by kordless »

jon-wood wrote: post #25
kordless wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Self hosted analytics is still centralizing behavioral data on the users. It's not really any better from a privacy standpoint than GA.

Its nowhere near as centralized as Google Analytics though - at least if you're self hosting that data is confined to the silo which is your own analytics, rather than Google being able to aggregate that with their behaviour on every other site they visit as well.

That silo is still aggregating data. Trying to argue its "less" centralized by using quantification of the amount of centralization is still akin to dissonance. Clearly people here don't agree with this, but that's to be expected when the topic is so polarizing. Traffic analytics must be important, so we rationalize our actions, or inactions around how we collect them.

Any centralized solution, at any scale, can possibly violate someone's privacy. Period. If we want to really fix things, we should stop circle jerking ourselves and do something about it.

Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#194

Post by fiatjaf »

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…

I've replaced Google Analytics in all my projects with my CouchDB-only web analytics service, Microanalytics[1], which I could access from a CLI[2] and worked very well.

But then I started to fall short on disk space for storing too many events. This is a problem.

[1]: https://github.com/fiatjaf/microanalytics

[2]: https://github.com/fiatjaf/microanalytics-cli

Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#195

Post by zachh »

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

What do you use as a front-end?

Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#196

Post by [deleted] »

jon-wood wrote: post #25
kordless wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Self hosted analytics is still centralizing behavioral data on the users. It's not really any better from a privacy standpoint than GA.

Its nowhere near as centralized as Google Analytics though - at least if you're self hosting that data is confined to the silo which is your own analytics, rather than Google being able to aggregate that with their behaviour on every other site they visit as well.

[deleted]

Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#197

Post by newscracker »

jasonsync wrote: post #133
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…

Plug: https://www.sync.com

The only issue I have, which is similar to what I see with some other providers, is that the first non-free plan is a huge jump in storage space and price. If I want a Dropbox replacement, I'd be looking at a 25GB or 50GB plan (just comparing what I have with all kinds of free storage bonuses accumulated over years). Having some more "in-between" plans that are more linear in storage and price would've been an incentive to try this out since I'm not willing to fork $49 a year for 500GB while knowing that my Dropbox usage is less than one-tenth of that.

Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#198

Post by blfr »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #190
tombrossman wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Even AWS limits how fast you can upload to S3... I'm on gigabit fiber and use S3 to backup hundreds of gigs per month to S3. I've never seen them limit upload speeds, it is clearly saturating the connection for the entire duration of my upload. I would expect that because I am paying for the storage, they would be happy to let me write data to their machines as fast as I like. Is there a citation you can provide fr…

> I would expect that because I am paying for the storage, they would be happy to let me write data to their machines as fast as I like. I don't understand why you'd think this. You're paying for storage, not an SLA as to how fast you can fill it. > I'm paying a premium for gigabit fiber to the home and you really can tell who over-promises and under-delivers quickly. Fortunately my 'roll your own' backup + sync work…

He thinks this because it's in Amazon's interest to let him dump as much data as possible. It's not a matter of an agreement, it's a matter of aligned incentives.

Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#199

Post by chimeracoder »

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…

> 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' laziness in my opinion.

Unless I'm mistaken, one big difference is that not using Google Analytics means you don't know which Google search pages people used to access your website. That can be a really important difference for some websites.

Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#200

Post by huhtenberg »

buro9 wrote: post #167
huhtenberg wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

Spectacular joke.

This whole conversation started with you saying why abandon GA when you can use it without compromising clients' privacy. An exchange that followed shows that one can't actually derive not just the same function from GA that way, but virtually any function at all. Yes, you can feed data in, but the usefulness of what you can get back out is next to zero. What am I missing?

From your opening comment:

> Why not move to push GA data server-side?

Because it renders GA largely useless if clients' privacy is actually observed.

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