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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

#131

Post by ianwalter »

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.

Here is some feedback:

The example (https://trackingco.de/public/9ykvs7rk) does not work for me. Also, the first time I visited the site I saw Lightning Bitcoin and then left. You lost me as soon as I read that because I'm not interested in that. I was just trying to find a simple (but useful) analytics service that's easy to use.

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

#132

Post by jandrese »

eli wrote: post #92

I think there are a lot of misconceptions about how Google Analytics tracking works. I'm pretty sure a vanilla GA setup does not, in fact, create profiles that track you across the web. For one thing, all the cookies it creates are first-party (on your domain). I still get objecting to Google products on principle, but their privacy policy for GA seems pretty reasonable to me: https://support.google.com/analytics/ans…

Google doesn't need cookies. They can profile your browser and check the source IP to track you around the web. Given that Google's business is information, it seems unlikely that they aren't doing this very easy form of tracking.

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

#133

Post by joshyi »

southerndrift wrote: post #71
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…

Isn't there a problem with GDPR compliance if you want to serve European pages? You are allowed to log IP addresses for security reasons. However, as far as I understand the situation, you need the agreement of the users if you use their personal data, which includes IP addresses, for anything else. Has somebody figured out how to resolve this situation with log files?

Looks like goaccess supports --anonymize-ip=true which sets the last octet of IPv4 user IP addresses and the last 80 bits of IPv6 addresses to zeros.

source: https://github.com/allinurl/goaccess/blob/master/config/goac...

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

#134

Post by LyndsySimon »

sharcerer wrote: post #122
LyndsySimon wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I totally agree on the security aspect, but I think we're talking about different threat models.

Security matters if your concern is the data leaking to a potential malicious actor. The concern that I'm speaking to is the intended use of the data. Google is definitely going to use it for ad targeting and building a "shadow profile", but a small developer probably won't. This one says they won't, but even if they do they're likely to be much less effective than Google would be.

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

#135

Post by ckluis »

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…

If you could track pageload time and show a distribution of that per page time - I would buy this in a second.

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

#136

Post by donut »

harianus wrote: post #101
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…

Good comment! I only store the window.innerWidth metric. I updated the what we collect page ( https://simpleanalytics.io/what-we-collect ) to reflect the IP handling. We don't store them. And fingerprinting is something that would be definitely tracking, not on my watch!

You wrote "Point." - did you mean "Period."?

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

#137

Post by harianus »

Reedx wrote: post #125
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?

Just postgreSQL queries.

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

#139

Post by lucideer »

dvko wrote: post #113
lucideer wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What do you think? Apart from the unfortunate non-open-source answer, this sounds great! I get others' concerns about wanting unique pageviews, but that metric is always a bit of a sketchy either-or for extremely privacy-conscious people. It's both an incredibly valuable metric, and also one that's difficult to square with complete privacy (basically it's always going to be pseudonymous at best).

If you need an open-source solution that truly cares about privacy yet can still keep track of unique pageviews, there's always Fathom Analytics ( https://github.com/usefathom/fathom ).

Wow. I've never come across this. Thank you, I'll look into it.

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

#140

Post by Jach »

Cpmly wrote: post #59
danielbln wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could argue that if it is very early stage, then it's maybe not the right time to charge $12/month.

Exactly what I thought as well, for what it is at the moment it isn't worth anything. Also I doubt that Analytics is a B2B only product, the majority will be private persons running their blog or hobby forum using it.

From the user perspective, being an early adopter of something that isn't really worth anything now can have external value of increasing the likelihood that you can drive the product direction towards something that will be very useful to you in the future (and without having to pay upfront costs of hiring a contractor and figuring out exactly what you want now). Especially if you're paying, people tend to listen to paying customers' feedback a lot more than web randos.
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