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Cloudflare’s privacy-first Web Analytics is now available for everyone

blog.cloudflare.com

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Re: Cloudflare’s privacy-first Web Analytics is now available for everyone

#21

Post by baggy_trough »

zaroth wrote: post #5

> The concept of a “visit” is key to this approach. Rather than count unique IP addresses, which would require storing state about what each visitor does, we can simply count the number of page views that come from a different site. This provides a perfectly usable metric that doesn’t compromise on privacy. Say that again please? Is this tracking unique Referrer’s? What if a significant amount of traffic is direct?

Yes, that explanation is a little bit baffling. Referrers are not very reliable (increasingly missing). Maybe visits will just not be very accurate with this.

Re: Cloudflare’s privacy-first Web Analytics is now available for everyone

#22

Post by nallerooth »

WayToDoor wrote: post #9

Even tho I'm septic about Cloudflare privacy-first policy, this sounds like a great alternative to "giving all your users data to Google". Also, if your site is already behind CF, it's not like you give them much more information than they already have.

> it's not like you give them much more information than they already have.

My thoughts exactly. I'm hoping that we'll see a move from Google Analytics towards more privacy friendly services as they improve.

Then again, I'm not sure marketing people will want to move away from Google Analytics. And I don't think marketing people will read news from cloudflare.. so we'll have to educate them.

Re: Cloudflare’s privacy-first Web Analytics is now available for everyone

#23

Post by buildbuildbuild »

jgrahamc wrote: post #15

Also on the subject of not setting cookies. We're killing the __cfduid cookie for all customers: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25357729

This is a great move, thank you.

Options to purge analytics data and visitor logs would also be handy to give us more control over our users’ privacy, as well as the ability to transparently see how much of our user data you have collected and for how long it will be retained.

And while I have your ear, please consider supporting web servers hosted on non-default ports, and the setting of custom Host headers behind your reverse proxy. (in self-serve - hosting on privileged ports shouldn’t be a requirement of using your service for both security and IPv4 exhaustion reasons)

Love Cloudflare. It’s good to see your team self-aware about privacy concerns and working to mitigate some.

Re: Cloudflare’s privacy-first Web Analytics is now available for everyone

#24

Post by kmfrk »

Can you have multiple trackers set up? I get the same tracking code for each domain I try every time I set it up, which isn't great for keeping relations between websites private.

The token makes it seem like it's per-user rather than a general one everyone gets.

Re: Cloudflare’s privacy-first Web Analytics is now available for everyone

#26

Post by heipei »

As much as I applaud every alternative to Google services, I would think about these kind of analytics twice when running any kind of developer-centric service. Chance is that your target audience is running an adblocker / DNS blocker of some sort and that this will heavily skew the analytics results: The absolute numbers will be a lot lower and you will only capture folks not savvy enough for adblockers. I removed any external analytics about a year ago when I realized that more than 50% of visitors to my service were blocking Google Analytics and that GA numbers had become meaningless (cross-referenced against access.log).

Re: Cloudflare’s privacy-first Web Analytics is now available for everyone

#29

Post by fastest963 »

What happens to "visits" in Brave or other browsers that strip the Referer header in top-level navigations [1]? Also, what about direct traffic?

They shouldn't even try to report "visits" if it won't be accurate because now they're just going to have a bunch of confused publishers asking why the numbers are so different than GA.

[1] https://www.cookiestatus.com/brave/#referrer

Re: Cloudflare’s privacy-first Web Analytics is now available for everyone

#30

Post by jgrahamc »

buildbuildbuild wrote: post #23
jgrahamc wrote: post #15

Also on the subject of not setting cookies. We're killing the __cfduid cookie for all customers: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25357729

This is a great move, thank you. Options to purge analytics data and visitor logs would also be handy to give us more control over our users’ privacy, as well as the ability to transparently see how much of our user data you have collected and for how long it will be retained. And while I have your ear, please consider supporting web servers hosted on non-default ports, and the setting of custom Host headers behind y…

Thanks. I've passed all this on to the right people.
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