Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

We ditched Google Analytics

spideroak.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

261–270 of 273 posts

Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#261

Post by JupiterMoon »

ufmace wrote: post #166
JupiterMoon wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I said that I care and that I hope that I am not a customer of businesses that track me and contribute to google's tracking. In that case I am 1 in 1000 and if a site doesn't work without GA and I don't have to use it (as in to file my taxes have to) then I won't I will purchase from a competitor.

EDIT Most people do notice and do care this has come up in countless conversations. They just accept it as a necessary evil that they can't do anything about and accept (wrongly) that they as a individual can't change the world.

Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#262

Post by JupiterMoon »

buro9 wrote: post #18
JupiterMoon wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, i…

What info does Google get on your customers in exchange for your free use of their service?

Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#263

Post by curehproducts »

buro9 wrote: post #134
huhtenberg wrote: post #36

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…

> (edit) I re-read your comment. You aren't apparently interested in session counts. But what's good the GA summary then if you can't tell 10 bounced visitors from one visitor with 10 hits? This makes no sense. If you want to look at just page hit numbers, there are dramatically simpler ways to do that. I do not care to track users/sessions, page views are enough for me. I am tracking content and content views... and…

We offer best maximizer" rel="nofollow">http://www.cureherbalproducts.com/maximizer-oil-in-islamabad... oil in Islamabad. Maximizer oil in Lahore at low price. Good quality maximizer Oil in Rawalpindi and Multan. High power maximizer oil in Gujranwala and Hyderabad

Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#264

Post by buro9 »

JupiterMoon wrote: post #262
buro9 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, i…

What info does Google get on your customers in exchange for your free use of their service?

You've emphasised that word as if it changes the question somehow, but I don't see how it changes the answer.

Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#265

Post by JupiterMoon »

buro9 wrote: post #52
huhtenberg wrote: post #36

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.

Why not use your server logs for this information?

Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#266

Post by JupiterMoon »

buro9 wrote: post #264
JupiterMoon wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What info does Google get on your customers in exchange for your free use of their service?

You've emphasised that word as if it changes the question somehow, but I don't see how it changes the answer.

Because by using your website I become your customer I am doing business with you. I don't always want a third party involved.

You never answered what info do you send to the owner of the tracking library that you licence? Or if you send them no info how do they get paid?

Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#267

Post by angersock »

muzmath wrote: post #259
angersock wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're Google, sure. Most of the startups here aren't Google. People are prematurely optimizing if they fear is "but but but mah datamoose". Also, it's not prohibitively costly if you do even slight batching of the events, say batch load between every five minutes or an hour. I'd love to hear somebody with war stories chime in though!

You criticize people for _premature optimization_ while in the same breath advocating rolling your own, shitting implementation for page views? Right...

Incorrect--remember, there is no way of guaranteeing privacy of users *if you outsource analytics for your page.

You're missing the point of why "rolling your own shitting [sic] implementation" is worth it: it's not the speed, it's the privacy.

Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#268

Post by billmalarky »

brettz wrote: post #257
billmalarky wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People have scaled it to over a billion actions per month. No clue how much of that includes customizations though... It sounds way past the out of box limit. Look at the comments from sandfox and afterlastangel in this thread. afterlastangel is pushing a billion, sandfox is around 300 MM per month. http://forum.piwik.org/t/high-traffic-piwik-servers-database...

I'm looking into replacing GA Premium ever since Easylist blocked GA tracking for Adblocked users and self-hosted Piwik seems like the best solution. I'd be well into the billions.

With that kind of traffic hopefully you have the resources to pull it off. Good luck!

Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#269

Post by niutech »

X-Istence wrote: post #246
toomuchtodo wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> reduce their potential storage liability Its to reduce their maximum bandwidth capacity required. I don't see it as a problem, considering their price points. They're selling you storage, not "slam 1TB of your data into our storage system in a day". If you're looking for that, ship a hard drive to Iron Mountain. EDIT: Even AWS limits how fast you can upload to S3, and built an appliance for you to rent and ship bac…

The appliance is so that you don't need to send terabytes of data over a 10 Gbit/sec connection for example to their datacenter. The limitation is actually the pipe that connects you to Amazon, not an inherent limitation within S3 or other services within Amazon on connection speed. If you have a good enough connection, or peering with Amazon things go amazingly fast. When I worked at an ISP, we slammed about 20 Gbit…

Can I ask, why would an ISP upload 300TB data/day? Are you wiretapping all users' packets?
Post reply on HN