While I appreciate the push for privacy and anti-tracking, ultimately the tools to prevent tracking are in the hands of users and organizations. The concept that countries have jurisdiction or even exist within the confines of the web is a laughably antiquated idea projecting itself into a realm where it doesn’t belong. Google and all of the usual suspects will continue to collect information about the public in all of the ways that they want, while the naive public believes in some false notion that their leaders are protecting them from the big bad wolf. If you don’t want to be tracked, the only person who can prevent that is you. Government agencies are the keystone cops or this is world. All they’re doing is a Chinese fire drill.
Companies must stop using Google Analytics
201–210 of 672 posts
Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
Could you link to a site where you’ve rolled your own SPA? Or ideally the source code. I’d like to take a look as not many people do that, even less do so with enough attention to detail not to cause UX regressions (not that third-party solutions are brilliant either).
I'm an enjoyer of anonymity online and would rather not doxx myself. However if you have a specific question, I'd be happy to answer. I use js/jq for the front-end and php for the backend. Once you have your own CMS, turning it into a SPA means turning your index.php into a index.html that is php free and relies on ajax calls to change the content. So at minimum you need a mainbody.php and a head.php that accept inpu…
(Not OP) The kind of regressions I'd think of would be things like:
- updating the URL state when someone clicks on a button
- proper back-button support in the browser that takes me back to the prior 'page'
- being able to navigate to any URL deep in your app and get a valid response (ideally rendered server-side so there's no client-side loading delay).
Things like these are hard, and the reason why it's common advice to use a framework and not hand roll. If you hand roll but don't support these things gracefully, you're making a case for not hand rolling.
Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics
#203Earlier 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…
It’s like two dudes developing the solution and more importantly, charging you for it. If you don’t see the radical difference in incentive structures, then I don’t know what to tell you.
Sorry, had a bit of time left today. Its more like 7 dudes, and their whole proposition is underwhelming TBH. Mostly gratuite statements against the ruling order. Half their website is a rant against the 'capitalist' competition. And the whole Christmas tree of doing good is exposed. But nothing really sticks:
- Simple and easy: wait until the product matures
- Open source: but no foundational governance, like Apache for example.
- Promise never to sell to investors, but nothing is in place to actually prevent that from happening. Note this common practice via a social enterprise.
- 45 kg reduction of CO2 compared to Google per average website(!): clear violation of EU law (2006/114/EG) in my opinion.
- They suggest to proxy their service to circumvent consumers who actively block traffic to plausible. This is OK, because they are good.[0]
Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
> That said; we also have "Cloud Engineer" as a job title, so I'm not sure we will learn this lesson. Comparing something as vast and broadly reaching as "Cloud" is a disengenous comparison to something as specific as a tool like Google Analytics, kind of a wierd comparison IMO. The entire pattern of tech is towards the "cloud" - even if you refuse to use the big ones like Amazon, Microsoft, or Google, it's still tec…
> Comparing something as vast and broadly reaching as "Cloud" is a disengenous comparison to something as specific as a tool like Google Analytics Is it? Tons of cloud people I know are very narrowly specialized and certified on AWS or Azure. They certainly don't ever apply for jobs using the other... I'm sure they could retrain. But I'm also sure they don't want to.
I work at AWS Professional Services, people move around among AWS ProServe, Google/GCP, and Microsoft/Azure all of the time.
Heck plenty of people come into ProServe with no AWS experience. But they know their areas of specialty well and it only takes a couple of months to use AWS specific services.
Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics
#205My 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…
There's a saying: You'll never get rich harvesting in someone else's garden. It's not just Google Analytics, all Google products can be killed off at Google's whim any time, and it's not just google. That's why it's so important to work with tools you could own.
What if you don't want to get rich and just want to work enough to be comfortable and then come home and do other things besides tending a garden? In that case pay me to tend your garden so I can ignore it when I am not on the clock.
Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics
#206Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics
#207My 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…
I can tell you thats not the case…
Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics
#208Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Who has time to watch videos without a high level overview? :)
Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics
#209One 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.
I have not researched it but I wonder if you can even hash IPv6 addresses. The issue I see is that allocations could be too regular so even if the full space is huge most addresses may occupy a small and predictable part of it.
Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics
#210Analytics 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
Most alternatives are not made by advertising companies, but they also frequently aren't free... Rolling your own from the ground up is not necessary or typically advisable when there are so many good options, including many self-hosted and open source options if you're wanting that level of control.
I usually describe the cost of GA as "subsidized by your customers' data".