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No Cookie for You

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Re: No Cookie for You

#141

Post by heroprotagonist »

This is fantastic. Thank you, GitHub.

I hope this is a good demonstration of a hands-off approach at Microsoft in regard to company culture.

I realize you likely still collect some analytics for yourself and that this change does nothing to alleviate that. EG, first party javascript. But it's great that it's divorced from 3rd parties.

Presumably Microsoft has access to those metrics, though? I wonder how deeply that gets parsed in conjunction with everything else they collect.

If only you could export some of that culture back to your corporate overlord. I'd love if MS Teams stopped exploding it's RAM usage until it eventually has to be killed if it's unable to get an OK response from its analytics endpoint.

And I'd love to turn off analytics in Windows altogether. Even getting to the minimal analytic configuration is an exercise in futility spread out across a million different settings, some of which decide to reset themselves in obfuscated ways sometimes. eg, some think updates reset them, either directly or by doing things like changing default programs to ones which require analytics (eg Office). Or a change to one setting requires additional changes elsewhere to be effective.

Re: No Cookie for You

#142

Post by mh- »

abdullahkhalids wrote: post #121
tuna-piano wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looked for a few minutes and couldn't find the full answer. How does Plausible calculate unique users if it can't store some type of identifier on the page? I see this... "We do not generate any persistent identifiers either. We generate a random string of letters and numbers that is used to calculate unique visitors on a website and we reset this string once per day." But where is that ID stored?

> How can Plausible Analytics count unique visitors without cookies? > So if you don’t use cookies how do you count the number of website visitors and report on metrics such as the number of unique users? > Instead of tagging users with cookies, we count the number of unique IP addresses that accessed your website. Counting IP addresses is an old-school method that was used before the modern age of JavaScript snippet…

This would be woefully inaccurate for websites with a large amount of mobile traffic (because of CGNAT), or university traffic, or etc.

Re: No Cookie for You

#143

Post by Blikkentrekker »

AndrewStephens wrote: post #31

I hate the standard wording on Cookie banners. Most of them should read: "The site uses cookies. Actually it doesn't - you are not logged on and we don't need to maintain state. But our advertising partners, their partners, and their partner's partners all love to set tracking cookies. Click here to consent to three dozen cookies from around the globe."

So what happens if one consent to it, but also have third party cookies disabled in one's browser settings?

Is disabling it there globally æquivalent to not accepting on such banners?

Re: No Cookie for You

#144

Post by GoblinSlayer »

distantsounds wrote: post #80

I literally proposed this solution in a previous HN thread, discussing the cookie situation. I'm glad a large business such as GH is able to take the _extremely_ painless route of just outright removing them entirely.

They removed cookies, but they don't claim to remove ad ids, they only don't use cookies to store them. Also worth remembering that github is a social network and has no privacy by design, it also builds its own user profile a part of which is public.

Re: No Cookie for You

#145

Post by interestica »

AndrewStephens wrote: post #31

I hate the standard wording on Cookie banners. Most of them should read: "The site uses cookies. Actually it doesn't - you are not logged on and we don't need to maintain state. But our advertising partners, their partners, and their partner's partners all love to set tracking cookies. Click here to consent to three dozen cookies from around the globe."

I hate the implication that those banners are some sort of consent. They're so commonplace now that people blindly click 'okay' or close them just to be able to read the site. If the wording was something else ("you agree that we can take your first born child") would it even hold up?

The worst is when the banner says: "This site uses cookies. Agree / Disagree" -- it's not even asking for consent.

Re: No Cookie for You

#146

Post by chipotle_coyote »

coldpie wrote: post #111
louhike wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another solution is to do all the tracking in the backend. I'm not saying it's a good solution.

Or, don't do any tracking. I'm convinced that 99% of all analytics is discarded without ever being reviewed, analyzed, or acted upon.

This is probably correct.

On my personal web sites I'm using GoAccess, which is basically a new spin on a very old idea -- just analyzing the server's web logs.

https://goaccess.io

That's not as accurate as throwing around cookies and JavaScript, but I rarely check the log pages anyway, and when I do I'm less interested in raw numbers than I am in the relative performance of various pages. (And that's mostly just idle curiosity, e.g., are there some old articles that keep getting steady traffic from somewhere?)

Re: No Cookie for You

#147

Post by Wowfunhappy »

geek_at wrote: post #24
dry_soup wrote: post #3

A lot of people have the misconception that the EU cookie law applies to all cookies, but as the blog post correctly points out, that just isn't the case.

True. Also even if you do track your visitors you can use privacy friendly (and ideally selfhostable) Analytics like Plausible https://plausible.io/ so you won't need the banners either. Just don't include facebook like buttons or any of these widgets

Does anyone happen to know of a service like this that is free (not self hosted) for non-commercial, low-traffic sites? Or which costs less than ~$10 per year.

I have a basic Github Pages site, and I currently don't know whether anyone is looking at it, beyond the very few who take the time to email me. I don't need (or want) to know anything about my visitors, but it would be nice to know that I'm not simply tossing stuff into the ether.

Re: No Cookie for You

#148

Post by TheDong »

3pt14159 wrote: post #15

This is great! GitHub continues to, somehow, surprise me. One question I do have, however, is whether or not the new homepage[0] which shows where people are when they open a PR actually reveals their present location. In the few samples I checked it did not seem that the presence of the person indicated matched their bio's location settings. If it is truly unmasking people's location I think it should be opt-in only…

The data is available unauthenticated here: https://github.com/webgl-globe/data/data.json

If anyone wants to do any further analytics on it, it's easy enough to pull PRs and lat/lon from that.

It does look like lat/lon might be a fixed value for each city (from spot checking a couple). If it's not, that would be surprising and a pretty egregious leak of user info.

Re: No Cookie for You

#149

Post by Nextgrid »

Blikkentrekker wrote: post #143
AndrewStephens wrote: post #31

I hate the standard wording on Cookie banners. Most of them should read: "The site uses cookies. Actually it doesn't - you are not logged on and we don't need to maintain state. But our advertising partners, their partners, and their partner's partners all love to set tracking cookies. Click here to consent to three dozen cookies from around the globe."

So what happens if one consent to it, but also have third party cookies disabled in one's browser settings? Is disabling it there globally æquivalent to not accepting on such banners?

Consent often involves more than just cookies. Consenting essentially allows them to use other tracking technologies beyond cookies such as IP addresses or browser fingerprinting.

This is also why the GDPR requires consent forms instead of relying on browser cookie settings, as it covers the intent of tracking itself as opposed to any technical means by which it is achieved (and this is why functional cookies such as for logging in or shopping carts don’t actually need consent at all).

Re: No Cookie for You

#150

Post by Macha »

gfxgirl wrote: post #127
Spivak wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“And we would rather not have this crap but nobody pays for content are there only two types of ad networks: privacy preserving and paying so we’re stuck. Please call your congressperson to complain [here].”

I'm confused.... AFAIK the biggest ad company, Google, doesn't share your private info. It's not in their interest to do so. Instead they keep it to themselves and then offer ads by categories so as a 3rd party I can say "Please target this ad at 'video game players'" but I can't ask "give me the names of video game players"

The issue is by including google tracking on their web page, then from a legal point of view the publisher is sharing your information with Google
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