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Companies must stop using Google Analytics

imy.se

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Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#141

Post by bombolo »

jkukul wrote: post #73
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.

With server side tracking you're not able to identify and properly track non-logged in users. GA (and other client-side tools) take care of this, via cookies. Additionally, a common argument is that the server side logs contain a lot of logs from bots/crawlers and GA (and alike) can filter them. The other side of the coin is that GA (and alike) are not able to track users with Adblockers. EDIT: not sure why I'm downv…

They also ensure that you need the annoying popup to consent to tracking to comply to the law, rather than doing no tracking and not annoying your users.

Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#142

Post by berkes »

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…

I'm using plausible Analytics. It logs and displays very little data. And no PII data.

It's more then enough for me.

And a few clients whom I enabled it for, told me they very much liked the simplicity. Less data as a feature!

Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#144

Post by poniko »

alkonaut wrote: post #129
poniko wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

This is where it gets tricky and why I need to find out more details about the new rulings. Google does not store IP when the user is from the EU but this still seems inadequate to the IMY.

https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/12017362?hl=en

Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#145

Post by worksonmine »

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.

That's why you use a salt, which is what I assume is meant by "non-reversibly".

Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#146

Post by berkes »

phartenfeller wrote: post #140

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 co…

I'm using the hosted version of plausible.

After I hit the FP of HN two times in a month, their billing warned me of overusage. One email, In which I explained the situation from me, and I got a very friendly email back, from a human, in which they allowed me to stay on my small plan despite the overuse.

Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#147

Post by ttctciyf »

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…

> will be economically useless if it is banned.

Economically set back, maybe. "Useless" (with its implication of permanence) is way OTT.

Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#148

Post by fredoliveira »

bdcravens wrote: post #132
anonylizard wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Seems horribly limiting regardless of how we slice it.

Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#149

Post by Qwertious »

leononame wrote: post #135
bunnyfoofoo wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

A salt will render rainbow tables useless, but AIUI will not prevent brute-forcing after the fact. IPv4 has ~4 billion addresses, which would be too expensive for data analytics but could be brute-forced if someone really wants this one piece of data in particular.

Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#150

Post by EGreg »

kristiandupont wrote: post #131
EGreg wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Watch the videos for a start
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