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Companies must stop using Google Analytics

imy.se

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Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#391

Post by pyrale »

dijit wrote: post #390
pyrale wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> However now we're in a situation where at least a few thousand people depend on this precise tool existing, and will be economically useless if it is banned. If a 6-12 month training has no skill transferable to another analytics tool, I strongly suspect the training was useless to begin with. Other analytics tools are not so dramatically different from GA that you'd lose all methodology on what to monitor, how to…

Java to C# is pretty close though to be fair. Going from Haskell or Scheme to Rust or even Python is going to take some time before you're completely comfortable with all the built-in's the standard libraries, the "pythonic" or "rustic" way of writing, tools and so on. It's a lot of hidden things, you're not completely useless of course, but it's not like you write "production quality" code and have the ability to wo…

I chose the languages used in the comparison with that in mind. Moving from GA to e.g. Matomo or Plausible does not require to completely reshape the way you think about your problems, you don't have to change the way you work, you just have to learn how your new tool implements it.

(Also Haskell to Rust is pretty straightforward, the typesystem knowledge you learn in Haskell usually means the harder parts of learning rust are made easy. Having done that transition, 1 month is reasonable to be productive in Rust)

Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#392

Post by esalman »

Cyberdog wrote: post #381
esalman wrote: post #8

Unrelated: I used ChatGPT to generate remark.js presentation HTML code from some content. It did generate the code, but it inserted a GA snippet along with a random GA account code at the bottom of the code. I did not even catch it immediately (laziness, totally my fault), but noticed it a couple of days later when I was modifying the presentation.

Wait… People are actually using ChatGPT to write production code? That's not just a meme?

Hope that's not sarcasm lol.

Yeah we have copilot subscriptions at work and an Azure GPT-4 instance that is being trained with enterprise data.

Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#393

Post by victorbjorklund »

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…

Probably, not totally wasted. If you learn the principles of analytics (what KPI:s to measure, why, how to diagnose based on analytics data etc) you can hopefully transition to another analytics platform such as matomo. Kind of like how it isn't wasted time to learn a programming language even if you later have to switch language.

Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#394

Post by pyrale »

dijit wrote: post #276
primax wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Sysadmin background is akin to first principles when it comes to Cloud. I also have a sysadmin background and my journey to the cloud has been "I can learn new things that make things easier or just use some pretty standard Linux VMs at any time". Most new entrants to cloud learn the following: * an object storage system (GCS, S3) * A functions as a Service system (Cloud functions, Lambda) -- if you are lucky, Cloud…

This is terrifying.

Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#395

Post by pyeri »

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…

>> Google Analytics was sold as a solution to you making your own analytics, because that's hard

It's not hard at all, it's just that we have become too lazy and mentally dependent on big tech companies!

If all you want is user tracking, a few lines of JavaScript is all you need on the frontend. A popular WordPress plugin named jetpack gives you almost all data needed for site analytics, for example.

There are other tools too like tableau and python based tools like pandas and numpy which help you with all kinds of analysis.

Humble techies are everywhere with their tools, you just have to trust them a little bit, that's all! It's almost like trusting your Uncle Joe's pizza dude next door instead of the familiar Domino's or McDonald's. It takes a while but you'll eventually discover there's no difference.

Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#396

Post by verall »

prime17569 wrote: post #196
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 is almost like U.S. high schools, which almost exclusively require students to have Texas Instruments TI-84 series calculators in math class.

With a student:teacher ratio around 30:1 I'm not sure what the alternative would be

Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#397

Post by pyrale »

nazka wrote: post #367
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…

Depending on your knowledge of the browser, it's not extremely hard to rollout your own barebone analytics.

If you're only interested in session data without collecting any cross-session knowledge, all you have to do, basically, is tag your page and listen to dom events.

Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#398

Post by olliej »

Ok, what is it that google/Facebook analytics is providing people that has them so obsessed with harming their users privacy and slowing their page loads?

I really don't get it: you don't need to sell out your users to google, Facebook, etc to get page view counts, time page loads, get browser statistics, etc. What is it that site developers actually think they're getting out of abusing their users?

Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#399

Post by pyrale »

supriyo-biswas wrote: post #67
foepys wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't want my data in the hands of the NSA as much as you don't want yours in the hands of the BND, FSB, or the People's Liberation Army.

Fair enough, but this were actually the reason, simply adding a statement such as “if a non-EU member state wants to request data about an EU national and said data cannot be released to the law enforcement of the non-EU member without a MLAT being served to the EU national’s government” would have been enough. However, I don’t see that, and many Europeans do give “dominance of Americans” as the reason, so I simply g…

Someone has not heard about CLOUD act.

The European Comission has repeteadly tried to figure out a framework that would let US providers access EU markets safely, respecting EU laws. Every single attempt has been broken because there is no way for an US company to respect EU law and also comply with the CLOUD act.

The bit of law you suggest would essentially make it impossible for a company to respect both EU law and US law.

Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#400

Post by onionisafruit »

kstrauser wrote: post #339
onionisafruit wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Nearlyfreespeech.net does. I’ve used them for many years to host static sites.

I’ve been tinkering around on nearlyfreespeech.net for about an hour now, and I love it. Thanks.
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