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Companies must stop using Google Analytics

imy.se

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Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#131

Post by kristiandupont »

EGreg wrote: post #28
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

This is true not just for analytics but pretty much all features. Imagine you are a great speaker and instructor and have an audience. Right now you GIFT it to YouTube, Twitter, etc. and they monetize it for you, give you a tiny percentage, and even constantly direct your audience to competitors and other distractions. In fact YouTube even sells an option to advertise your videos on your competitor’s videos! I say —…

All the videos on qbix.com itself seem to be hosted on youtube?

Also, the features pdf lists "nodejs" and "php" as features.. I don't mean to be snarky here, but I am simply not sure what this product is?

Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#132

Post by bdcravens »

anonylizard wrote: post #119
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.

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

More likely: Imagine being a 'frontend developer' who can only use React.

Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#133

Post by ori_prior »

dragonwriter wrote: post #102
ori_prior wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This level of dependence on certain tools is neither rare nor unprecedented. Your run-of-the-mill business drone will be trained on Word/Excel/Outlook and be hard to impossible to retrain on anything else (either because of actual stupidity or resistance to change). This already starts at school where "Informatik" is often just learning where to click in Microsoft products. Similarly, tradespeople often specialize in…

> Your average car repair guy will often be forced to specialize in one brand of car. Not because of skill issues, but maybe forced because they work for a dealership that sells a particular make exclusively or, less often, a specialty shop; most “car repair guys” outside of those environments have to be generalists. > Your home appliance guy will preferrably sell and repair one brand of washing machine, dryer, dishw…

> Not because of skill issues, but maybe forced because they work for a dealership that sells a particular make exclusively or, less often, a specialty shop; most “car repair guys” outside of those environments have to be generalists.

Yes, I'd expect any car guy to be able to change your tires. Or change your oil. But even resetting the oil-change alarm or tire-pressure sensor can be a hurdle here:

Manufacturers also use skill issues to their advantage to bind tradespeople. Modern cars do need manufacturer-specific diagnostic devices that used to be unobtainable for independent shops. Since that practice has been largely forbidden by the authorities, now the software, cabling, and diagnostic output are made intentionally hard to understand without having taken the corresponding lessons that the manufacturer provides for a modest fee.

Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#134

Post by bennyp101 »

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

That's essentially what I did, don't need to know the browser or device or where they are from (the product is UK only, so it's largely irrelevant) - so as I control the server side, just log page visits and certain CTA's, and can see a rough journey of where people have been and if they placed an order or not.

That's far more useful than hoping that people have JS enabled or tracking stuff blocked.

(I.e. Can see that they visited an order page, then back to FAQ's, then clicked on a "whats is x" link - so should probably update the content on the order page to explain what X is)

Obviously it depends on what data you actually need, but that gets me most of the way there without gathering a load of data that isn't needed

Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#135

Post by leononame »

bunnyfoofoo wrote: post #130
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.

But you could use a salt, right?

Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#136

Post by Aachen »

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…

> how much people actually use ALL the analytics information

I sometimes check access logs and pipe some grep queries into a line counter, or uniq by IP address to have a rough idea of how many people look at a particular part of, or tool on, my website. Maybe twice a year or so. Helps prioritise which things are worth maintaining/updating based on what's still being read (found by search engine or linked from third parties)

Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#137

Post by berkes »

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…

Last time we had a privacy officer make a report on our setup, we were (unknowingly) sending much more PI data to Google than the IP. The fact that you e.g. clicked the "like button" on profiles/xxx, leaks that you have access to xxx, can like it, and have liked it. There were many more like this. Ours was a business tool.

The data we were leaking was e.g. the fact Foo was employee at ACME, simply because we sent events occurring on the estate of Acme for user Foo.

It's not as straightforward as proxying. Or, as we did, removing some bits from the IP.

Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#138

Post by bombolo »

supriyo-biswas wrote: post #42
suddenclarity wrote: post #24

This case is about the old Analytics that was replaced with Google Analytics 4 in 2020. So they must stop using a version that Google definitely killed July 1 this year. There are arguments that GA4 would fail the same requirements. Denmark hold that view but it hasn't been tried. Their argument is that a EU-citizen that goes to Asia and visits a site there, will have his information sent to US servers and not EU ser…

The result is the balkanization of the internet, although most folks in the EU want that for nationalistic reasons and to prop up their own industries, under a thin veneer of opposing US imperialism (but being unable to do anything with respect to the things which actually threaten the EU, such as an over dependence on Russia.)

EU is much more threatened by an over dependence on USA.

Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#139

Post by wouldbecouldbe »

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…

Im still waiting for the Scrum fad to passover and the entire scrum masters guild to be without a job.

Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#140

Post by phartenfeller »

I am using a self-hosted Plausible [1] instance, which is GDPR-compliant out of the box with no cookies required. I am super happy with it. The only downside is that you need to run Postgres and Clickhouse which is overkill for my small sites (an option that only uses SQLite would be great). I don't want to track my users. I just want to see which pages get traffic. Sometimes I am also curious about where visitors come from (by country) and what devices they are using.

In a newer update, they allow region tracking based on cities. I think this is too much information. I did not enable this and hope they won't add other more intrusive features.

[1] https://plausible.io/

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