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13% of my website visitors block Google Analytics

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Re: 13% of my website visitors block Google Analytics

#51

Post by adrianN »

YetAnotherNick wrote: post #43
lawn wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is analytics synonymous with Google analytics?

Is there any difference in privacy from user's perspective if you use Google Analytics or self hosted? If any, the later is more prone to be hacked or misused than former and could not be easily blocked like Google's.

I'd argue that yes, there is a difference between having lots of small data silos with private data and having one huge database that tracks complete behavior chains. I don't really care whether the bartender at my usual pub knows what I like to drink, but I would care if there were a global database tracking my drinking behavior.

Re: 13% of my website visitors block Google Analytics

#52

Post by orwin »

yonixw wrote: post #31
onion2k wrote: post #4

None of my website users need to block Google Analytics.

Sorry to say, but without analytics and campaign analytics, you probably don't know what your user want or need. I don't like the analytics auto hate behavior. Edit: I don't justify google and facebook wrongdoing in the past and present. But to hate on those who are (forced) using them and calling to remove them from the website is not helping without an alternative. It will surly take a toll on your digital presence…

The article explain very well he is using Plausible analytics, that works without cookies or stocking strong PIs. https://plausible.io/data-policy

Re: 13% of my website visitors block Google Analytics

#53

Post by tannhaeuser »

yonixw wrote: post #31
onion2k wrote: post #4

None of my website users need to block Google Analytics.

Sorry to say, but without analytics and campaign analytics, you probably don't know what your user want or need. I don't like the analytics auto hate behavior. Edit: I don't justify google and facebook wrongdoing in the past and present. But to hate on those who are (forced) using them and calling to remove them from the website is not helping without an alternative. It will surly take a toll on your digital presence…

There's no analytics hate per se; the problem is the centralization of all usage data at Google, and analytics without consent.

Re: 13% of my website visitors block Google Analytics

#54

Post by m90 »

__alexs wrote: post #20

Slightly off topic: Plausible claim that their cookieless tracking is GDPR compliant but this seems a bit shaky to me. Unless they are doing something that isn't specified in their docs their fingerprinting seems reversible which would make their user identifiers PII like any session ID you'd store in a cookie. AIUI the GDPR doesn't particularly care about cookies, it cares about you tracking people without their con…

Even if this hash would include a salt and the salt is rotated daily, you'd still be able to reverse information for the last day (there's an interesting doc by the European Union itself on that topic: https://edps.europa.eu/data-protection/our-work/publications...).

I feel most of these "privacy" focused analytics tools are mostly about working around the need for a cookie banner. I also don't get how they can continue to show off their public dashboards full of data that has been collected without user consent, boasting about how many hits they have.

Gives me the feeling "Privacy" is more of a marketing tactic here than a mission.

Re: 13% of my website visitors block Google Analytics

#56

Post by chrismorgan »

ck_one wrote: post #45
chrismorgan wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even when I run JavaScript (I don’t by default), uBlock Origin blocks https://plausible.io/js/plausible.js through Peter Lowe’s Ad and tracking server list . Not sure if that’s one that’s enabled by default or if it’s one I’ve enabled. So yeah, I would expect the true Google Analytics blockage figure to be markedly higher than the 13% reported here.

Is plausible also blocked when used with a custom domain so that tracking results are POSTed to your own domain?

If you use a CNAME (tracker.mysite.example → tracker.example), uBlock Origin on Firefox will still be able to block it. (I have no idea whether Plausible offers this mode of operation. I don’t see “CNAME” mentioned on their site, so probably not.)

If you run some kind of proxy yourself on an unconventional name (e.g. “ads.mysite.example” may well be blocked) and make sure that any script it needs loads from your own site, again with an unconventional name (e.g. “piwik.js” would be blocked as Matomo), then your tracker won’t be blocked until someone notices.

If you want to head far down this route, smuggle analytics data in with legitimate requests and separate and forward it on your server.

Fortunately, taking it to this extreme takes enough effort that it’s decidedly uncommon.

Re: 13% of my website visitors block Google Analytics

#59

Post by AmericanChopper »

dakiol wrote: post #35
yonixw wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry to say, but without analytics and campaign analytics, you probably don't know what your user want or need. I don't like the analytics auto hate behavior. Edit: I don't justify google and facebook wrongdoing in the past and present. But to hate on those who are (forced) using them and calling to remove them from the website is not helping without an alternative. It will surly take a toll on your digital presence…

This is not true. One can make a product better without relying on analytics. Sure, it takes more time (and probably more skilled people) but it's possible. There are companies out there doing well without GA.

GA is just one tool, and it’s not even the best one (though the better tools are often worse privacy-wise). But client side analytics will always be able to deliver UX insights that you’ll simply never be able to get any other way. If you had two equivalently skilled and resourced product teams, one would always be at a disadvantage to the other if only one of them was using client-side analytics tooling.

That said, product teams that are actually good enough to gather and productively use that sort of data aren’t very common, so switching off client-side analytics probably wouldn’t make much difference to most organisations. Page hits and error stats can be pretty easy to make use of, but you can get that from server logs.

Re: 13% of my website visitors block Google Analytics

#60

Post by realusername »

YetAnotherNick wrote: post #43
lawn wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is analytics synonymous with Google analytics?

Is there any difference in privacy from user's perspective if you use Google Analytics or self hosted? If any, the later is more prone to be hacked or misused than former and could not be easily blocked like Google's.

Yes there is, it's harder to track you around the web when the data is scattered around multiple places with no way to group the identifiers.
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