I am so grateful for the progressive policies in Europe that help the entire globe.
Yes. Every time I see a cookie consent dialog, I do a quick "thumbs up" to our pals in Europe.
Companies must stop using Google Analytics
221–230 of 672 posts
Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics
#222Good news then, Google has deliberately and bizarrely broken its API, so thousands or possibly millions of legacy sites will never correctly report their analytics again.
Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics
#223My 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…
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Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics
#224Earlier quoted context omitted.
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".
Salts provide resistance against bulk bruteforce by making it so that you can't identify which hashes are the same plaintext without actually computing all of them. The issue is still that there are not that many IPv4 addresses and so even with very heavy algorithms it would be trivial to break.
Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics
#225Earlier 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.
IDK, I used to worked with "Drupal consultants" who barely knew PHP. They delivered the sites they were asked to, usually on time and within budget.
Drupal was the only accessible door to me to this entire industry in 2010, with no CS knowledge or available mentors. I was one of those people and I barely fed my family, and I eventually learned PHP, JS, the hosting stack, automating the hosting stack, Varnish and HAProxy, Linux sysadmin, how the internet works, and a decade of topics since.
We all need a door into this stuff, a place to be dropped in to start putting it together. Maybe the OP’s sister in law is totally out of luck, or maybe she’s now got a few of the hundreds of tools she’s going to need to build out a career. Luckily she has a brother in law in the industry, hopefully he’s the helpful type.
Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics
#226My 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…
If the ability to work with the things taught in that course is so dependent on GA, then I dare question the term "data analytics" for that certification. Data analytics is a general area of expertise, that is not bound to GA. Perhaps the certification should be called "Google Analytics Certification", instead of implying more knowledge and skill than is actually there.
Data analytics has some statistics in it, these days probably a pinch of training ML models and using them and understanding them in the basics as well. Source: I did some work for a company specializing in creating courses for actually learning data analyst skills, as a preparation for switching careers towards data analyst jobs. I myself helped creating course content. The course is officially certified for job-seeking people as a means of learning a new job.
Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics
#227Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or if you're after free analytics, Cloudflare has something. Should be GDPR compliant since they don't use cookies or local storage.
Cloudflare is also questionable when it come to GDPR. Lots of folks conflate privacy and cookies with GDPR. Compliance is much more than that.
Cloudflare Web Analytics is extremely simplistic and does not allow for any persistent identification of users or storage of personal information. It uses HTTP Referrers to count visitors and that's it.
One could argue that since it's a US-based company it can't be Shrems II compliant, but you can make that argument about a lot of things.
Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics
#228Had an engagement with a client a few years ago and GA came up. Folks on our side tried to avoid Google where possible, and I'd suggested some alternatives. Matomo, Fathom(IIRC) or others - multiple folks on the team had experience with these alternatives, but the client was insistent on GA. "This is the industry standard - look at all the billion dollar companies running GA - this is what we should use". I pointed out those comparison companies also had dozens of engineers per project; we had 3 part time people.
The argument kept coming down to "GA is the standard; GA is what people know". Which is... true, if not somewhat circular.
My other suggestion was try multiple; run GA and Matomo together, for example, for a bit. Or GA on just the public marketing site, and something else on the internal application. Nope, because they wanted to track every single ad spend all the way through to registered user usage of the internal business application. Knowing that the $70 you spent in Tacoma geo lead to 3 users registering then knowing that those 3 people routinely used a budgeting tool more than the $90 spent on 8 people who registered from Toronto... apparently those sorts of analytics might be needed in the future, so we have to have this.
Instead of "let's just install both for a few weeks and try them", this became "let's 'investigate' multiple options and write reports about the pros and cons of each". Nuts. My larger concern was that, for testing/dev purposes, we'd not have as easy a time of 'resetting' an analytics DB that was not under our control (resetting or maybe creating new/unlimited sandboxes for each test run). I didn't find any way in GA (or really any hosted solution) to handle testing well. But maybe that's not a big concern among 'enterprise' analytics users?
Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics
#229My 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…
> where at least a few thousand people depend on this tool
Just taking Google employees alone, a few *tens* of thousands of people depend on this tool. Millions of non-Googlers depend on the tool.
Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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