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Show HN: I made a privacy-first minimalist Google Analytics

simpleanalytics.io

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Re: Show HN: I made a privacy-first minimalist Google Analytics

#41

Post by wnevets »

AdriaanvRossum wrote: post #2

Creator here. As a developer, I install analytics for clients, but I never feel comfortable installing Google Analytics because Google creates profiles for their visitors, and uses their information for apps (like AdWords). As we all know, big corporations unnecessarily track users without their consent. I want to change that. So I built Simple Analytics. To ensure that it's fast, secure, and stable, I built it entir…

> like sending requests as JSON requires an extra (pre-flight) request, so in my script I use the "text/plain" content type, which does not require an extra request.

what are the security implications of this?

Re: Show HN: I made a privacy-first minimalist Google Analytics

#42

Post by clpwn »

sondr3 wrote: post #17

I've moved away from using any kind of script embedded in my webpages for tracking and instead just use Goaccess ( https://goaccess.io/ ) to analyze my logs. Though there are obvious caveats with this, you need to install it, configure the server logging to match it and so on. But personally the benefits outweighs the cons, it all runs on the server, you are the sole owner off all the data and this tracking doesn't r…

Not to mention GoAccess is often more accurate since many visitors use extensions which block 3rd party trackers.

Re: Show HN: I made a privacy-first minimalist Google Analytics

#43

Post by e12e »

always_good wrote: post #34
iampims wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don’t retain the IP address, retain a hash of the IP address.

When you can trivially crawl the input space like ipv4 addresses, you'd have to expire a fresh per-day salt as well. But to my eyes, expiring salts isn't much different than deleting ip addresses after one day. Just more machinery. People have to trust that you're doing either, so why bother beyond being able to use the word "hashing" in marketing language?

You'd at least want per record salts. But even then it's trivial to check if a given ip is in the dataset. Better, but not great. (ie: you have access to the dataset, you want to check if a given ip/time match the log - read the salt, check the hash).

Re: Show HN: I made a privacy-first minimalist Google Analytics

#44

Post by johnnycarcin »

sondr3 wrote: post #17

I've moved away from using any kind of script embedded in my webpages for tracking and instead just use Goaccess ( https://goaccess.io/ ) to analyze my logs. Though there are obvious caveats with this, you need to install it, configure the server logging to match it and so on. But personally the benefits outweighs the cons, it all runs on the server, you are the sole owner off all the data and this tracking doesn't r…

I LOVE Goaccess and highly recommend it as well. My single complaint is the lack of ability to filter/define a date and time range. I know there is an issue for it but last time I checked it had been open for quite some time :(.

Re: Show HN: I made a privacy-first minimalist Google Analytics

#45

Post by sincerely »

hashr8064 wrote: post #20
AdriaanvRossum wrote: post #2

Creator here. As a developer, I install analytics for clients, but I never feel comfortable installing Google Analytics because Google creates profiles for their visitors, and uses their information for apps (like AdWords). As we all know, big corporations unnecessarily track users without their consent. I want to change that. So I built Simple Analytics. To ensure that it's fast, secure, and stable, I built it entir…

Hey I like the idea but have a question. How are you storing all the information that analytics users want to know i.e. (What devices, what languages, what geolocations, what queries, what page navigations and clicks, etc.) After reading what you collect I'm assuming you are doing a lot of JS sniffing of browser properties to gather this information along with IP address analysis is that correct? Or what are you plan…

It doesn't look like they collect or store languages, geolocations, or devices beyond screen sizes.

Re: Show HN: I made a privacy-first minimalist Google Analytics

#46

Post by saudioger »

teddyh wrote: post #10
harianus wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are open source alternatives that do similar things, I want to give people not the hassle of setting up servers, maintaining their versions, and having no updates if they don't. See it as non-self hosted solution like Heroku is for deployment. I believe it should be simple as installing a Google Analytics code.

Matomo has both “cloud-hosted” and self-hosted options. What is the advantage to using this compared to Matomo’s “cloud-hosting”?

I guess you're not paying Matomo and don't need to have another company controlling your data?

Re: Show HN: I made a privacy-first minimalist Google Analytics

#47

Post by thesimon »

iampims wrote: post #29
always_good wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't seem like a very useful measure of uniqueness. What if you had one-day retention of IP addresses for per-day unique views? Seems like too important of a metric to eliminate completely, and one-day retention seems like a decent trade-off at the expense of being able to do unique analysis over longer time periods.

Don’t retain the IP address, retain a hash of the IP address.

Not private enough as the space of IP addresses is too small. Removing the last octet of IPv4 addresses before storing them should provide better privacy.

Re: Show HN: I made a privacy-first minimalist Google Analytics

#48

Post by saudioger »

IshKebab wrote: post #21
gryzzly wrote: post #12

The idea is great, but price is way too high for a simple site. Many people are interested in anonymised data like pageviews and geographical distribution, for example, but these people pay 10€/year for domain and often 0 for hosting for static site generators. 12€/month is just really expensive at this level, but good luck and I’m sure for many people it’s totally fine price.

I agree. It would be better to make the pricing proportional to traffic and have a free tier. With a single price you're both pricing out small people who just host blogs or whatever and aren't going to pay more than $10/year, and also way undercharging businesses who don't really differentiated between $10/month and $50/month.

If it's a single developer just starting out, the cheap customers aren't going to be the ones keeping development going. Increasing the price isn't a terrible idea though.

Re: Show HN: I made a privacy-first minimalist Google Analytics

#49

Post by tootie »

sondr3 wrote: post #17

I've moved away from using any kind of script embedded in my webpages for tracking and instead just use Goaccess ( https://goaccess.io/ ) to analyze my logs. Though there are obvious caveats with this, you need to install it, configure the server logging to match it and so on. But personally the benefits outweighs the cons, it all runs on the server, you are the sole owner off all the data and this tracking doesn't r…

This is how we did web analytics in the old days. The original WebTrends was just a log analyzer for apache.

Re: Show HN: I made a privacy-first minimalist Google Analytics

#50

Post by exikyut »

My feedback: someone else mentioned making the tiny live demo button bigger. I suggest scrapping it entirely... and embedding the demo statistics directly under the video, or very close to it, to go straight from "why" to "what it looks like". The chart/stats page design is sufficiently clean that shoving the whole thing onto the homepage won't actually be an information overload.

Speaking of the video, it's ridiculously professionally done, by the way; excellent acting to begin with and perfect line delivery (confident, well-timed, no hesitancy/awkwardness) as far as I'm concerned.

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Apart from this, my only other advice is - reject buy offers, reject partner offers, sleep on VC offers for as long as you can (if, ideally, you don't outright reject these as well), and take this as far as possible on your own. I say this considering two standpoints.

a) Considering the developer: this is incredibly well done and you clearly have the competency to drive this forward without assistance. The website and video presentations are both great; the product defaults easily tick "sane enough"; and the only thing stopping me throwing money at the screen is that I have no projects that need this right now - but others definitely will, and I look forward to seeing this go viral.

b) Considering the product: "oooo internet privacy" is a well-trodden path with a thousand and one different options which are all terrible in their own way. You have the opportunity to differentiate by offering something that gains a reputation for actually not compromising, even months and years down the track by working to eliminate some of the sociopolitical cascade that can contribute to dilution of quality. Customers have sadly had good reason to associate buyouts with rapid decline in quality, so that sort of thing just looks bad at face value too.

To clarify what I mean by taking this as far as you can on your own: it's obvious others have already provided assistance - filming and acting in the video, and for all I know beta testing and maybe other development support - and I'm not pointing at that and suggesting it will bite you. I mean that, if you ever bring help on, find a good lawyer who will ensure the project remains _yours_ and make sure there are no implicit "50/50" partnership agreements or the like.

I can't find the references right now but I've read of a couple of projects/products that have exploded sideways (very sadly) because of jealousies and impedance mismatches creating imbalances that provoke partners brought onto projects to assume control and pivot things out of a creator's control, without the creator having any legal recourse.

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