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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

#121

Post by curun1r »

nickdandakis wrote: post #89

To everyone complaining about the price point for this service. You are part of The Problem. This is a solo dev's venture, that has a relatively pure and straightforward goal. If you can't afford it, don't use it and pick one of the others. Do NOT compare this with a B2C offering that has nothing to do with analytics. Do NOT compare this with a B2B offering that's free and feeds your user's data into the parent corpo…

Heh...I had the opposite reaction to the price. As someone building something in the analytics space, $12/mo seems so low that it won't get traction beyond the hobbyist demographic. If you want to sell to business, the price point needs to be at least $200/mo.

Plus, I have zero confidence that someone using a naive postgres implementation can scale an analytics backend with customers paying only $12/mo unless all those customers get barely any traffic. Perhaps if he was using Timescale on top of postgres, but even then, $12/mo seems awfully low.

But as it is, the price point signals that he doesn't think it's a particularly valuable service.

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

#122

Post by sharcerer »

LyndsySimon wrote: post #104
pdkl95 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> unnecessarily track users without their consent Regardless of your intentions, you are collecting enough data to track users. > I am transparent about what I collect ([URL]) That page doesn't mention that you are also collecting (and make no claim about storing) the globally-visible IP address (and any other data in the IP and TCP headers). This can be uniquely identifying; even when it isn't unique you usually onl…

I think there's value in at least distributing the data that's collected. I may not like that the analytics provider has my data, but it seems like a lesser evil if that provider isn't also the world's largest ad company and they aren't using it to build profiles behind the scenes to track my every move across a significant part of the Internet. Given the choice between a lot of data about me given to a small provide…

Thats no a good way to make a decision. Big,small doesn't matter. What matters is who is providing better security? When 2 parties big,small are collecting data ,then the party which can act on security vulnerabilities quickly and has great security engineers and dedicated teams like Project Zero- is the much better choice. People nowadays assume that a small,indie developer is a good guy. I am just pointing out that this is a very bad bias to have. Technicalities matter, security robustness matters. Google might be collecting data,but their security is really good. Good effort by this dev though.

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

#123

Post by ucarion »

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…

First off: hats off for making a product that takes the rights of the end user seriously!

However, I am a bit confused as to who would want this product. The sort of questions this product answers seem quite limited:

1. What URLs are getting lots of hits?

2. What referrers are generating lots of hits?

3. What screen sizes are those hits coming from?

What decisions can be drawn from those questions? This seems useful only to perhaps some blog, where they're wondering what sort of content is successful, where to advertise more, and whether to bother making a mobile website.

Without the ability to track user sessions -- even purely in localStorage -- you can't correlate pageview events. For instance, how would I answer a question like:

- How many high-interest users do I have? By "high interest", I mean someone who visited at least three pages on my website.

- Is a mobile website really worthwhile? How much of an effect does being on mobile have on whether someone will be "high-interest"?

I should think some anonymized user ID system -- even if it rotates anonymous IDs -- should be able to answer these questions without compromising privacy.

Also, I'll leave it to others to point out it's unlikely this product is exempt from GDPR.

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

#124

Post by phprecovery »

At my work (The New York Public Library), we created a “Google Analytics Proxy” that receives requests and then proxies them to Google’s Measurement Protocol so you still get the benefit of using Google Analytics but can control exactly what’s sent/saved in real-time.

It’s intended as a mostly drop-in replacement for the GA analytics.js API and to be used as an AWS Lambda.

You can check it out here: https://github.com/NYPL/google-analytics-proxy

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

#125

Post by Reedx »

mosselman wrote: post #40

For a project of mine I created an 'actions' table in my database. For every visit (only server-side data) I make an entry into that table. That way I keep track of key metrics that I am interested in (basically which page is loaded and where did the visit come from?). I also store the request id so that I can differentiate between different visits. Entries into this table are made in an new thread in order to preven…

What did you make to view it? Or do you just run SQL queries?

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

#127

Post by mr337 »

fiatjaf wrote: post #119

This feels like a rant, but I've posted my https://trackingco.de/ here multiple times, which has very similar proposal (and is cheaper) but never got a single line of feedback.

The live demo doesn't work that is linked on the main page.

https://trackingco.de/public/9ykvs7rk

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

#128

Post by wongarsu »

e12e wrote: post #43
always_good wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

But per record hashes break the original use case: checking if a given hash is already in the database.

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

#129

Post by [deleted] »

lucideer wrote: post #13
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…

This look great—have bookmarked it for future projects. I would however a little more skeptical with tools claiming to be privacy-first than I would be with GA (who I presume are not privacy-first). On that note, some quick questions: - Any plans to open source? I've used Piwik/Matomo in the past, and while I'm not a massive fan of the code-quality of that project, it's at least auditable (and editable). - You say yo…

[deleted]

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

#130

Post by wongarsu »

harianus wrote: post #19
lucideer wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This look great—have bookmarked it for future projects. I would however a little more skeptical with tools claiming to be privacy-first than I would be with GA (who I presume are not privacy-first). On that note, some quick questions: - Any plans to open source? I've used Piwik/Matomo in the past, and while I'm not a massive fan of the code-quality of that project, it's at least auditable (and editable). - You say yo…

- No plans to go open source with the backend, but I do show the code that is run in the browser. The visualisation of the data is not super important I think. - I don't save IP's, not even in the logs. - I don't have unique pageviews at the moment. I will in the future. If the referrer is the same as the current page, I will measure that as a non-unique. What do you think?

If you don't go open source, will you at least offer paid self-hosting (similar to what e.g. Atlassian offers).

The idea of privacy is much easier to sell if the data never leaves your own server, instead of using some analytics provider that might be run by the CIA or the Russian mafia for all we can prove.

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