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Companies must stop using Google Analytics

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Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#111

Post by marvinblum »

beefield wrote: post #95

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.

I guess you can use any JS snippet integration available. There are plenty of alternatives:

https://european-alternatives.eu/category/web-analytics-serv...

I'm the co-founder of Pirsch (pirsch.io), so if you have any questions regarding analytics (any, not just ours), let me know. For our solution I can assure you that it's GDPR compliant and doesn't require a cookie consent banner.

Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#112

Post by sethammons »

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…

> Imagine if a robot vacuum recorded videos of your home and uploaded them so that bunch of ML engineers can see and use it to improve the algorithm.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/12/19/1065306/roomba-i...

Yup, happing. Recent news on a lady whose vacuum took a pic of her on the toilet being leaked.

Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#113

Post by DeathArrow »

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…

Many people depend on YouTube or Instagram to make money. If YouTube and Instagram bans them - and it happens - they lose the ability to make money.

Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#114

Post by spython »

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…

"Any reason why my Xiaomi Robot Vacuum uploads 11.5GB of data per month to the internet?" https://www.reddit.com/r/Xiaomi/comments/9tgyrg/any_reason_w...

Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#115

Post by pSYoniK »

oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #60
pSYoniK wrote: post #59

What I am curios about is how much people actually use ALL the analytics information provided by a lot of these tools. I know Matomo and other such open source/self-hostable solutions, but how much info do you really use? I think for most use cases users would want to know if their content is consumed/read. Maybe how long someone spends on it and where they came from. For this sort of stuff you can write a small scri…

> For this sort of stuff you can write a small script to parse your logs. IFF you have access to your logs.

So you can setup GA but you can't check your web server logs?

Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#116

Post by happymellon »

pelasaco wrote: post #68
happymellon wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GDPR has nothing to do with cookies or local storage. They are just mediums that are potentially impacted by GDPR. GDPR simply makes collecting personal data without consent illegal. This is why a lot of American centric sites block us from accessing them, they want your data, and they don't want to ask for it.

> This is why a lot of American centric sites block us from accessing them, they want your data, and they don't want to ask for it. Or they just think that the costs to adapt their solution, or any law infringement implications don't worth the effort.

You say "or" but then just give examples of what I said.

> law infringement implications

They comes from using people data in ways that you have no asked permission for. They don't want to ask for it because it's quite hard to spin "we want to mine your data for a Cambridge Analytica style social manipulation".

Adaption isn't that difficult, the cost comes from people saying no. They don't want to give that option.

Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#117

Post by DrScientist »

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…

For practical things it's hard to teach in the abstract - you have to do - and doing means choosing some sort of toolchain - typically the most popular is a frequent choice.

As an example imagine learning programming - without some real world practice. And if you do some real world practice you have to choose which tool to use.

I take your broader point - but I think it's inevitable that most courses of this type are based around a particular tool chain.

Most Data Science courses use Python for example.

Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#119

Post by anonylizard »

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…

Wow, job for people who only knew google analytics exist? I thought at minimum SQL is required, and today's analysts also need to know python/pandas at minimum.

Imagine being a 'frontend developer' who can only use squarespace.

Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#120

Post by bdcravens »

vladvasiliu wrote: post #74
znpy wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what you wrote is mostly true but also partially incorrect: many competencies are transferrable. there are privacy-compliant products in that sense, unless you've been literally told "click here and click there" you should be able to employ old concepts with new tools.

Given GP's paragraph: > Personally I find this astonishingly foolish of the people who train exclusively on these tools instead of first principles and primitives. I wouldn't be surprised for this to be a "click here and click here" kind of training. I've seen a painful amount of those. And then, when the inevitable "new and improved ui" comes along, these people are lost and require a new training.

These are essentially "IT Factory Workers". To be honest, I think there's value in that, with the same economics of "traditional" factory workers.
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