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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

#261

Post by amichal »

marichards wrote: post #237
amichal wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also: > When a customer of Analytics requests IP address anonymization, Analytics anonymizes the address as soon as technically feasible at the earliest possible stage of the collection network. The IP anonymization feature in Analytics sets the last octet of IPv4 user IP addresses and the last 80 bits of IPv6 addresses to zeros in memory shortly after being sent to the Analytics Collection Network. The full IP addre…

Why do we trust this statement? It's coming from a company that plays loose with the law and has had some of the biggest fines ever thrown at it. Sorry, but with no way to validate this claim, it is meaningless.

I'm just quoting them.

I'm well aware that all we have is "certification" and "audit" programs to verify their claims. I am also that these are less then perfect and they have been found out to misleading/"lying" before and appeared to prefer large fines rather then fix the the issue. It is 100% likely that their public statements don't match reality perfectly.

I posted the quote because there seemed to be a lack of understanding that this feature even exists in GA. The author of the Show HN post didn't even have a statement on how IP address logging (and various other PI in the GDPR sense) was handled when it was originally posted.

BTW, I think it's great that someone is starting fresh with privacy in mind but even with them we will still no way of trusting what they do with the packets sent their way...

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

#262

Post by harianus »

phprecovery wrote: post #124

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.co…

That is nice!

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

#263

Post by harianus »

mdasen wrote: post #111

First: really slick site. I'm not so into the video which takes a while to get to the point, but the site makes it really easy to understand the point of your product (and that's something a lot of sites lack). I do have some questions/comments and I apologize if they seem a bit rapid-fire. * When I look at the "Top Pages", there are links. When I click the link, it brings me to that page on your site not a chart of…

Quick reply, you can make websites public. So my stats are public.

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

#264

Post by joshyi »

ValentineC wrote: post #260
joshyi wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm able to get the screen size with goaccess. I placed a bogus in the document. e.g.,

That's a nice idea, but it requires wrapping script tags around the "pixel", right?

That's right. e.g.,

document.write("");

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

#265

Post by AdriaanvRossum »

whylo wrote: post #235
harianus wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, only if you make it public.

I was able to add the tracking code to my site without signing up and could see the stats without any authentication (see my other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18024886 ). Is that by design?

That is by design. For a very short period I supported a free plan which had only public data. So that’s why you see the behavior. It will be gone soon.

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

#266

Post by darekkay »

johnnycarcin wrote: post #256
darekkay wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a kind of a workaround. I rotate my logs with logrotate weekly, so the current week's logs are in access.log (and access.log.1) and past logs are in access.log.x.gz files. Then I run goaccess twice (once for .log and once .gz) to get both "all" and "latest" stats. It's not as flexible as a real filter, but it works for me.

Just curious ,are you using the web based UI to look at your data or the CLI? I use the web UI so I'm wondering how something like this might work with that. I'll have to poke around. Thanks for sharing!

I'm also using the web UI. I create "example.html" and "example-latest.html" with a daily cron job (the way I described) and move it into my web directory (behind a http auth).

I planned to do a write-up for a while now, I should finally get it done (my blog link is in my profile)

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

#267

Post by johnnycarcin »

darekkay wrote: post #266
johnnycarcin wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just curious ,are you using the web based UI to look at your data or the CLI? I use the web UI so I'm wondering how something like this might work with that. I'll have to poke around. Thanks for sharing!

I'm also using the web UI. I create "example.html" and "example-latest.html" with a daily cron job (the way I described) and move it into my web directory (behind a http auth). I planned to do a write-up for a while now, I should finally get it done (my blog link is in my profile)

Thanks!

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

#268

Post by sleepyhead »

alkonaut wrote: post #95
sleepyhead wrote: post #58

"We don't use cookies or collect any personal data." IP-address is considered personal data. So when the browsers visits a page with the JS, the IP-address of the user is transferred to your server. So that means the website I am visiting is sharing my IP-address with a third-party (you).

Would it make a difference If the information was anonymized /hashed?

Only if there is no way to identify the user. A hash or anonymised id is still personal data if you can identify a person with it.

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

#269

Post by harianus »

vassilyk wrote: post #183

I think everyone starts like that. Then, clients that help keeping lights on start asking for this and that. And suddenly you end up providing a service with user level insights, cross-device tracking and advanced behavioral segments powered by ML because why not. GA was simple, before.

Good thing that you mention this. I get a lot of requests of users that ask for adding support for custom events. I'm very strict in what I allow. If it could be named tracking, I say no. Custom events could allow tracking (if people use it like that or not), I will say no to those requests.

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

#270

Post by harianus »

pierrefar wrote: post #62

Looks good! I'm the founder of a similar service (Blockmetry). Obviously non-tracking web analytics is the future! I'm curious why you chose to host the data yourself instead of giving customers the data immediately at the point of collection. That's the path we chose for Blockmetry as it genuinely required to be a non-tracking web analytics service and makes it impossible to profile users. Any service that hosts its…

> I'm curious why you chose to host the data yourself instead of giving customers the data immediately at the point of collection.

I want to build a brand around trust. If people self-host and say they use my software, but are doing different things behind the scenes, it would hurt my brand.

Simple Analytics does host the data themselves, so people know the numbers are not tampered with and the data is handled the same for every customer. If people use our scripts directly, vistors of those websites can be sure that we respect their privacy with our values.

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