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Companies must stop using Google Analytics

imy.se

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Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#361

Post by inetknght »

kenjackson wrote: post #323
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…

There’s actually a far better reason they don’t retrain. There aren’t better tools. Or the tools are basically carbon copies (Google Docs and Sheets). Show me a product that provides so much more value for my team than Excel that it would be worth a retrain.

> There aren’t better tools. Or the tools are basically carbon copies

LibreOffice, free open source software. Just as good as Excel and... free.

Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#362

Post by worksonmine »

3np wrote: post #352
worksonmine wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The salt doesn't have to be plain-text, that's an implementation detail in the common password hashing algorithms for obvious reasons. The requirement was that the hash should be non-reversible. Store the salt in a (http-only) session cookie and concatenate it to the IP before the hashing rounds. Put your entropy in the salt and any brute-force attempt is theoretical. For every session you need to compute the exact c…

At that point, what value does the salted+hashed IP address give you over a randomly generated number (say, a UUID) per session?

None, I'm not arguing for the solution. Proxying through a PHP script just to keep using Google Analytics is overkill when private self-hosted solutions exist. I'm simply showing how you can anonymize IPs even from yourself, if the goal is to anonymize from only Google and not the server it could be useful across sessions.

The solution being overkill does not mean my first comment 'That's why you use a salt, which is what I assume is meant by "non-reversibly"' is wrong.

Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#363

Post by totallywrong »

dijit wrote: post #354
totallywrong wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you are describing is a "developer doing devops" arrangement, or maybe some junior guy with an associate-level certification. A well paid Cloud Engineer is 100% expected to know architecture, Linux, networking and all the things you mention.

there are engineers who specialise on systems that have been in industry long enough to be called senior that have never touched anything non-cloud. Most people who are “devops” with There are so many bootcamps for this too, and they mainly focus on AWS skills. Here's a few bootcamps that people might decide to take to break into "DevOps" of which none are assuming prior knowledge, though techworld with Nana does tea…

I know where you're coming from but the reality is that a lot of those things are increasingly less relevant. I'm not sure what real advantage I get today from having done racking and cabling of physical servers back in the day. In a managed Kubernetes world, I haven't leveraged my ability to run a massive pool of Linux servers in a long time (I kind of miss that btw). For all intents and purposes you can be a great DevOps / Cloud Engineer / SRE or whatever you want to call it without ever seeing a non-cloud system.

Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#364

Post by delecti »

firstplacelast wrote: post #345
delecti wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I were reviewing resumes and saw someone list themselves as a "cloud engineer", I would make very sure their skills listed the cloud provider used where I was hiring. That title would make me assume they were a specialist in a cloud until I saw otherwise.

That says more about you than them, though. You’re projecting your own inability to translate knowledge into new systems and assume the same of others.

I'm not projecting my inability, I'm assuming incompetence. I'm a cynic, not insecure.

I wouldn't blanket block a resume that said "cloud engineer", I'd just make sure to probe that they aren't just an "AWS engineer" or "Azure engineer".

Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#365

Post by ChainOfFools »

MSFT_Edging wrote: post #300
ozim wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try to get a French car in Poland, most shops are used to deal with VW, Audi. It is not impossible but if you try to go to a random shop you found on Google and fix your Citroen or Renault you might be surprised.

That's often certain German cars in the US. IE some shops will just not work on modern Minis. Plenty of shops will avoid weird, niche cars. Any mechanic can fix a Citroen, but is it worth the floor time it'd take to get the parts and figure out french quirks vs working on something they know that they'd make the same money in a third the time. Having done shade tree work on various cars, I'd totally turn down any Sub…

Once upon a time I was the proud owner of a third gen RX7, proud that is until the powertrain warranty ended and I had to go outside the dealership network for minor repairs. Basically your options were... go back to the dealership and pay unsubsidized warranty rates (double or triple what independent mechanic charged for "normal" engine work), or go to questionable looking characters running "performance" shops who wanted to side port everything they could get on a lift. And still pay double or triple the normal mechanic rate.

Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#366

Post by nerdbert »

ehnto wrote: post #20
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

Matomo is a good self hosted analytics option.

We found it to be nothing but trouble. Disappearing data, database servers bogging down under what should be trivial load because of inefficient SQL design, painful upgrade process, etc.

Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#367

Post by nazka »

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…

My company is Matomo too and wanted to use it to track how the user uses the WebApp. But Custom Actions are deprecated and Custom Dimensions are not made for that. Do you use any analytic tool to track what the users are doing that is GRPD compliant?

I am looking for something where I can track which button he pressed, how many times, which part of the app are the most used and underused, do some funnel of the happy paths, things like that. Like not to know who is the user but really app based and how the user uses the app. Before I used to use Google Tag Manager for that. But it’s not GRPD compliant so I can’t use it.

Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#368

Post by nerdbert »

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 —…

> Which is why (shameless plug warning) I spent 12 years and $1 million dollars with my team to build it.

How much of that one million dollars dollars went to creating the confetti effect following the mouse cursor around on https://qbix.com/ ?

Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#369

Post by Dylan16807 »

jhartwig wrote: post #270
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…

'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.

I someone can't be retrained, and it's not because they're being stubborn, what other reason do you have?

Is it better or worse to assume they're being a problem on purpose?

I won't say 'average' but I will say 'common enough to make changing software a huge issue'.

Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#370

Post by nerdbert »

EGreg wrote: post #269
nottorp wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who has time to watch videos without a high level overview? :)

The high level overview is at https://qbix.com/platform

I read that and don't feel like I have any more idea what this is. A CMS with some "community" features I guess?

But all those overlapping screen shots make it look like there's been an explosion at the website factory and the smart thing is for me to run in the other direction.

1/3 of the Youtube videos are just "This video is unavailable".

I couldn't look at it that much longer because the colorful stars falling out of my mouse cursor was so distracting I had to close the tab.

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