Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Companies must stop using Google Analytics

imy.se

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

261–270 of 672 posts

Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#261

Post by weird-eye-issue »

jkaplowitz wrote: post #259
weird-eye-issue wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't care about GDPR

This entire thread is discussing a data protection authority’s decision which was based on the GDPR. It wasn’t a blog post arguing against GA due to concerns about Google or similar. If GDPR is irrelevant to whatever you’re trying to say, I think you’re in the wrong thread.

I wasn't "trying to say" anything beyond why a lot of websites are forced into sticking with GA. In the content business industry you have to have GA to work with ad providers or if you want to ever sell your site it is a very important part of the due diligence

You can argue with that all you want but its just the reality of the industry

And am I saying it is an excuse or anything? No, I'm just stating how things are

Sad I have to put so many disclaimers in such a simple comment but people like to read into things that aren't there or jump to conclusions.

Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#262

Post by tjoff »

worksonmine wrote: post #235
sweetjuly wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But there are infinite numbers of salts. Please explain how this could be brute-forced as long as the salt is used correctly? What am I missing?

You need to protect it from yourself.

If you know the salt then you can trivially brute-force it yourself and now you are not GDPR-compliant.

If you don't know the salt then you'll have to use a new salt for each IP and then all hashed IPs will be unique and you have no way of correlating them so it is all completely worthless.

Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#263

Post by beardog »

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?

In addition to PHP, it is a "Distributed Operating System for The Web" https://qbix.com/ecosystem#Distributed-Operating-System

Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#264

Post by Arch-TK »

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…

You can set a tracking cookie when the user first accesses your website without needing them to log in.

Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#265

Post by nologic01 »

mritchie712 wrote: post #260
nologic01 wrote: post #167

When I visit a company site and it uses google analytics I know they are either: lazy, ignorant or hostile towards their (potential) clients. This set of possibilities spans all cases and none is actually a positive signal. Companies (and any entity that has an online presence for that matter) are entitled to know what people are doing in their platform and use any appropriate tool for that purpose. They are not enti…

How many do you really think are hostile? Your average person at your average company will one day think, "how are people finding out about us?". They do a Google search for how to answer this question for their company and find Google Analytics. This is certainly not hostile. May be slightly ignorant, but can you blame them?

For sure i have come across websites where my eyes rolled ("common guys, i know you are better than this").

But the web has not been transformed from a web of users to a web of data mined "product" without very conscious moral choices by many commercial actors.

Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#266

Post by cuu508 »

gmsiperx wrote: post #213

That's why we built Usermaven.com, a privacy-friendly website and product analytics tool. Our website analytics module is simple and gets the job done in one single easy-to-use dashboard. However, if you want to dig deep, you can use funnels, journeys and other features to get more insights out of our analytics. Usermaven collects all client-side events automatically so it makes it really easy for marketing teams to…

> For purposes of data protection laws, Userrmaven Inc., a company duly incorporated and organized under the laws of the United States of America, having its registered address at 2055 Limestone Road STE, 200-C, Wilmington, Delaware 19808, is the “data controller”

> To integrate your website or SaaS app with Usermaven, you'll need to add a simple tracking script into the Header () section of your website. Make sure this snippet is present on every page that you want to track.

(The tracking script's URL is https://t.usermaven.com/lib.js)

So similar issues as with Google Analytics – site visitor's data is being shared with an US company.

Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#267

Post by velut »

onionisafruit wrote: post #258
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…

Do you know a static host that makes logs available? I happen to be looking to do something like this right now, but I would rather not run my own web server for my simple static blog.

I recently deployed a static website on Bunny.net using their object storage and their CDN and they make available logs in this format https://docs.bunny.net/docs/cdn-log-format.

Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#268

Post by primax »

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…

As someone whose total compensation went up 600% over 5 years as a 'cloud engineer' from a sysadmin background, I think your comment is kinda silly.

Those skills are very transferable to new products and very little of the worth I bring is from my certs

Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#270

Post by jhartwig »

ori_prior wrote: post #89
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…

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…

'actual stupidity'... gotta love the general disdain of the 'run of the mill business drone'... It's funny my wife is a run of the mill business drone. She thinks IT is a bunch of assholes. I would say she is probably right. Way to keep things going.
Post reply on HN