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Companies must stop using Google Analytics

imy.se

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Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#121

Post by beefield »

marvinblum wrote: post #111
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.

Are those typically blocked by adblockers?

Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#122

Post by bdcravens »

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…

How many bootcamp "developers" tooled up in one framework and struggle outside of that?

Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#123

Post by marvinblum »

beefield wrote: post #121
marvinblum wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Are those typically blocked by adblockers?

Yes, all of them. For a non-blockable approach you can use a proxy on your own domain or by using a server-side integration.

https://docs.pirsch.io/get-started/proxy

Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#124

Post by devjab »

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…

Analytics and Business Intelligence in general tend to play a big part in modern enterprise organisations, at least in my experience. Often what happens with corporations is that the larger they grow, the more risk-averse decision makers become, and suddenly things like analytics become nice foundations to lean on for when a decision is questioned.

What I'd be curious to see is the ROI on these tools. They obviously work in some cases, but do they always work? We currently employ three business intelligence developers, and two developers who actually build products. What's the most hilarious about it, however, is that despite employing three BI's I can't tell you if they earn their keep, because their data doesn't show that.

Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#125

Post by alkonaut »

acatton wrote: post #45

Who needs analytics? I'm confused. When I worked at companies using google analytics, 99.9% of the time they could have gotten this data from server logs with something like awstats or goaccess. To this day, I still don't get what's the point of embedding some javascript to do extra-requests or a tracking pixel, when the data was already given once.

The question I have isn't why you need analytics but why you'd ever need any PII in the data. I don't care whether Bob clicked the button I only care whether 1% or 50% of users click the button. Or if those who clicked button A are likely to click button B so they should be closer together. Analytics should be anonymous usage statistics not tracking individuals. We are clumping two things together where one is bad and the other is useful and mostly harmless to integrity.

Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#127

Post by sschueller »

ehnto wrote: post #20
Pannoniae wrote: post #3

Analytics right now is basically "you won't get any useful information for your website because we value users' privacy, don't worry we see all of the data anyway" Remember, you aren't the customer if you embed Google Analytics, Google is. edit: if you want analytics, honestly just roll your own... you can't trust advertising companies with your users' data

Matomo is a good self hosted analytics option.

I am a bit concerned about how Matomo deals with security. All their PHP code is located in the public folder and they use nginx[1] rules to block access to scripts that are dangerous.

[1] https://github.com/matomo-org/matomo-nginx/blob/master/sites...

Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#128

Post by bsenftner »

fendy3002 wrote: post #83
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.

You'll be surprised at how many competent (or looked like) people that cannot connect the dots between technologies / tools. They excel at one tools and will having a very hard time migrating to new one since they cannot connect the concept and similarity between both. Not all, but there's many.

There was a time when "Six Sigma" was all the statistical analytics rage for everything and anything corporate. However, if one already knew statistics they'd encounter a franchise branded school of terminology, different formulas than the accepted standards, and their own separate "z-tables" that apparently backed in corrections for their use of non-standard formulas. It was a hugely successful re-branding of standard statistics with a branded hierarchy of made up human hierarchies and Scientology-level made up technical terms. All the "Six Sigma Black Belts" - an actual title in corporate pointy head world - are 1000% useless now, unless they are at some dinosaur still following that nonsense.

This is how corporations and the will to profit undermines first principal knowledge and leaves a wake of fake education that ultimately needs to be unlearned or unwisely held as a fragment of useful adrift in an island of potential non-logical nonsense

Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#129

Post by alkonaut »

poniko wrote: post #93
he0001 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

But if you wash the IP and any other PII then you can store it anywhere? So why store IP? Is it because GA doesn't offer an option to wipe PII from the messages?

Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#130

Post by bunnyfoofoo »

TekMol wrote: post #92

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 ver…

You can’t hash an ipv4 address. It’s trivial to brute force all possibilities given the limited problem space.
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