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Companies must stop using Google Analytics

imy.se

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Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#91

Post by Garvi »

Every time a client makes me implement google analytics or facebook pixel code I die a little inside. And even though some actually use google ads, they have zero benefit from using analytics. I know, because I'm the one adjusting their campaigns.

It's just another thing everyone does and one would be stupid not to, right, right? The lemming mentality always makes me sad because so many bad things in our society are a result of it.

And every time someone says that rolling your own is a waste of time,.. I roll everything my own, including CMS / SPA frameworks, because it's a giant waste of time to do otherwise in the long run. The only time I waste regarding rolling on my own is when tobacco is involved.

Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#92

Post by TekMol »

One could still use Google Analytics by proxying the tracking events. Afaik only the IP is considered private data. So one could mask or (non-reversibly) hash the IP, remove anything else which might be considered private data and then send the event to Google. A simple PHP script with a few lines of code could do that.

But Google lost me by:

A) Making it impossible to convert your old data into the new Analytics version

B) Abandoning the API which allowed you to code your own reports. Over the years, I wrote a ton of code that talks to the API. This is all worthless now.

I recently switched to self-hosted Matomo. At first I did not think much about it, but now after I got used to it, I have to say it is much better than GA. The interface is so much nicer and snappier. And more logical.

Apart from that, I like that it is open source. If there ever is a point in the road where the makers of Matomo decide on a non-compatible fork, I'm sure the community will write a converter that converts the old data into the new format.

And after using it for a while, it hit me: You can write your own reporting tools by just querying the MariaDB database! Using SQL is so much better than it was to fight the insanely complex and unintuitive Google Analytics API.

If I really wanted to still use Google Analytics, I would just write a converter, which pumps all the Matomo events into Google Analytics. That would be a GDPR-compliant way to use Google's tools. But I don't. I'm done with Google Analytics forever. Matomo is the promised land for me.

Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#93

Post by poniko »

he0001 wrote: post #56
poniko wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because of the law in US that the governments have right to all data stored on any server that a US company or its subsidiaritets own. That clash with the EU GDPR law and the fact that Sweden categorize IP-adress as a Privacy data point. I.e they can switch to a European vendor that do tracking and analytics.

> the fact that Sweden categorize IP-adress as a Privacy data point Static IP-adresses are considered identity by EU court[0]. There have been several verdicts where EU court have ruled them subjective to GDPR. [0] https://curia.europa.eu/juris/liste.jsf?language=en&num=C-70...

yes? You can still store data within Sweden/EU that contains GDPR data, you just need to have a valid reason and comply with the GDPR rules i.e remove the data when you don't need them for the reason you where saving them. Store the data outside EU is never ok.

Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#94

Post by thumbuddy »

hamasho wrote: post #50

I've finally come to the conclusion that user tracking is generally a poor practices and should be regulated. As a web developer, I didn't see it as a big problem. We always do it to maximize ad revenue, find out where users leave to increase conversion rate, and simply to improve UX. But even when the intent is to improve UX, tracking is inappripriate. Imagine if a robot vacuum recorded videos of your home and uploa…

It's almost certainly happening.

Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#95

Post by beefield »

So, a dumb question. What's the easiest way to run privacy friendly analytics on static github pages? "Privacy friendly" as in unambiguously no need for cookie/gdpr permission popups. "Analytics" can be as simple as page loads per day count. Anything beyond that is a bonus.

Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#96

Post by j-a-a-p »

LudvigHz wrote: post #62
j-a-a-p wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great for plausible.io of course. But what is the difference for the end user? - GDPR: hosted in EU vs US, so your data is traveling less far. The things the plausible can do with the data is more or less the same. - No cookies: don't see the point of that tbh, they will probably perform even more invasive tricks like finger printing to replace the cookie requirement Bottom line, the website visitors data is still lo…

> they will probably perform even more invasive tricks like finger printing to replace the cookie requirement It's clear you didn't even bother to look at plausibles data policy [1] before assuming what it does and doesn't collect. The TL;DR: it does not fingerprint, and it does not collect any identifiable information, be it about your device or your person. > Bottom line, the website visitors data is still logged,…

I indeed do not know Plausible and any of their motivations.

Google Analytics also does not provide PII to their end users per se. But I have seen many tools and solutions do just about anything to circumvent that. Merging analytics with transactional data and site logs. Adding company info to visitor data. There is an entire industry there.

So, an imaginable use case would be to self host it. Intercept to circumvent the limitation.

The reason why I am so cynical is not because of the motivations of Google Analytics or Plausible. It is what motivates the end users, the companies who are using these statistics.

Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#97

Post by thumbuddy »

janus24 wrote: post #39
esalman wrote: post #8

Unrelated: I used ChatGPT to generate remark.js presentation HTML code from some content. It did generate the code, but it inserted a GA snippet along with a random GA account code at the bottom of the code. I did not even catch it immediately (laziness, totally my fault), but noticed it a couple of days later when I was modifying the presentation.

> totally my fault IMHO, it's not totally your fault; private information shouldn't be shared with others. It's your responsibility to verify what ChatGPT is writing before you use it; it's OpenAI's responsibility to not share private information.

Just like how google wasn't going to train ML models on your private possibly confidential information...

Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#98

Post by mschuster91 »

dijit wrote: post #34

My sister-in-law (girlfriends brothers girlfriend, not that it matters) recently studied for a data analytics certification. Actually several. The entire course (located on here: https://medieinstitutet.se ) is based on Google Analytics. Now her entire value is tied to the use of Google Analytics, she will almost certainly fight very hard to ensure that these skills remain relevant, nobody would want to retrain for 6…

> That said; we also have "Cloud Engineer" as a job title, so I'm not sure we will learn this lesson.

As long as you don't depend too much on highly vendor-specific stuff, most of the stuff a "cloud engineer" uses day-to-day is just the same fundamentally - EC2/Azure VM/GCE, ECS/Azure Container Apps/Cloud Run, Security Group/Azure Network Security Group/Google Firewall, whatever. Different names, same or very similar stuff.

Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#99

Post by belorn »

dijit wrote: post #34

My sister-in-law (girlfriends brothers girlfriend, not that it matters) recently studied for a data analytics certification. Actually several. The entire course (located on here: https://medieinstitutet.se ) is based on Google Analytics. Now her entire value is tied to the use of Google Analytics, she will almost certainly fight very hard to ensure that these skills remain relevant, nobody would want to retrain for 6…

Naively I would assume that the purpose of a data analyst is about presenting the relevant information to a company. How that data is collected, stored, processed and indexed is the role of system administrators, web developers and database designers.

It seems very inappropriate to allow a data collecting tool to dictate what information is relevant for a specific company.

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