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

blog.cloudflare.com

81–90 of 121 posts

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

#81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Boy, is your company's product nicely done but annoying! :) Any plans to make the "continue without disabling" button harder to click in the future?

One of the local news stations uses them on their website. They have a tiny "continue without supporting us" link that blends in nicely with the text around it. The weird thing is I always see that link while my wife never does. I don't mean she can't find it; it simply isn't there. This is using Chrome on Android. No root or anything special. Doesn't matter if her phone is on wifi or mobile. On the other hand, I see…

The publisher can choose to remove the option to bypass the modal after a certain number of visits or after a certain period of time.

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

#82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're interested in how many visitors are using an adblocker you can use Admiral's [1] free analytics on your site. [1] https://getadmiral.com (Full disclosure: I'm a co-founder at Admiral)

Admiral's paywall is so glitchy on mobile, when I don't have an ad blocker installed but it frequently thinks I do, that I've learned recoil in disgust from any brand that uses your service.

That's unfortunate! Usually when this happens the user has a network filter, enterprise firewall, or something else on the network that's blocking some traffic. Publisher's have an opportunity through our platform to offer subscriptions as an alternative to whitelisting so you can view the site without ads. They can also issue you a free subscription.

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

#83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Can you elaborate on the "custom Host headers" ask? Are you looking to rewrite the Host header as the request gets passed to the origin (without changing the resolution of the origin)? Or something more like domain fronting? An example or two would be great so I can share with the team.

A custom Host header passed to the origin that differs from the actual Cloudflare-hosted subdomain, without changing its DNS resolution - correct. This would be helpful when the origin is hosted by an inflexible third party, or as a time saver to quickly switch between environments without needing to modify other parts of the infrastructure.

Example 1: A third-party service does not support custom domains, only responds to "Host: my-company.saas-helpdesk.com". For a clean user experience, I want "support.my-domain.com" to reverse proxy to "my-company.saas-helpdesk.com" while rewriting the Host header to their origin as "Host: my-company.saas-helpdesk.com". (I realize CSP headers and all sorts of pain might happen here - perhaps not the best example - but would be great flexibility to have around)

Example 2: My startup's origin only responds to "Host: beta.mydomain.com", and the developer with access to its code is on vacation. I want to release my product. I point "www.mydomain.com" to the IP hosting "beta.mydomain.com" but since that origin does not respond to "Host: www.mydomain.com" - it does not work. I need a Host header rewrite.

Thank you for your time!

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

#84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the local news stations uses them on their website. They have a tiny "continue without supporting us" link that blends in nicely with the text around it. The weird thing is I always see that link while my wife never does. I don't mean she can't find it; it simply isn't there. This is using Chrome on Android. No root or anything special. Doesn't matter if her phone is on wifi or mobile. On the other hand, I see…

The publisher can choose to remove the option to bypass the modal after a certain number of visits or after a certain period of time.

Good to know. Thanks.

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

#85
post #26

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 a…

If you're interested in how many visitors are using an adblocker you can use Admiral's [1] free analytics on your site. [1] https://getadmiral.com (Full disclosure: I'm a co-founder at Admiral)

Products like Admiral are why the Internet sucks. Everybody treating the Internet like their own little capitalist fiefdom consuming everything you do so you can be repackaged and resold a million million times.

I'm old enough to remember an internet that respected the sacred open ungated plain of knowledge. Publishers lost the privilege to monetize when they insisted on tracking, whether the visitor paid or not.

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

#86
post #26

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 a…

If you're interested in how many visitors are using an adblocker you can use Admiral's [1] free analytics on your site. [1] https://getadmiral.com (Full disclosure: I'm a co-founder at Admiral)

Weren't you the toxic sludges trying to DMCA your way out of EasyList and co?

How do you sleep at night?

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

#87
post #72
post #26

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 a…

How many people using adblockers block analytics rather than just ads?

Fundamentally I am much more concerned about blocking tracking that actual advertising. So I have my blocker set based on that. I'm pretty sure GA gets swept up as part of that.

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

#88
post #8

Couldflare and privacy ... good joke ;)

Are you going to make a substantive claim or just throw around accusations with no foundation?

Running effectively a MITM service for SSL then blasting private keys all over the internet might be a good example.

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

#89

Again, not analytics. Traffic stats. Blurring meaning here again, packaging data lying around from CF ops. Same as a stats counter from 2001. Veiled comparision to Google, who's in a different category for the most part - they're more like 'business analytics' where ('privacy' aside) you can see how users surf, improve UX, make decisions to help goals.

What you call Traffic stats is what most people are concerned with and the reason they add analytics.

That Google Analytics offers more in depth features is irrelevant for most people.

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

#90
This looks compelling - I've been wanting a simple way to track traffic volume on my static site. I don't have ads or anything and don't want to be creepy.

Basically just want to know roughly how many people are reading my blog posts and if any old posts are getting big upticks in traffic.

Hopefully this fills that need!

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