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Stop donating your customers' data to Google Analytics

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Re: Stop donating your customers' data to Google Analytics

#101

Post by shadowgovt »

> And if you think that's okay, you should take your head out of the sand because consumers are demanding it. Please tell me how many of your users like the large cookie agreement popups that they have to dismiss...I-I mean read and accept just to consume your content. Agreements that you're forced to have them agree to because you're using cookie-based trackers like GA.

I think that's the heart of why I so despise the GDPR. In an intent to change site behavior, politicians passed a law putting a burden on sites that did an undesirable thing (rather than, say, making the undesirable thing itself illegal).

Perhaps they thought sites would avoid the burden.

Did they not anticipate full shifting of burden onto end-users? Because being able to know how a site is used is extremely valuable to the site's owners.

Re: Stop donating your customers' data to Google Analytics

#102

Post by nemothekid »

Nullabillity wrote: post #60
falcolas wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say the following to this (very reasonable) argument against using AWS: AWS makes money by selling services, not collecting data. Should Amazon make the leap and start harvesting data from AWS for marketing purposes, the data from their analytics platform will be the least of our worries. Thus far, AWS has proven to be safe for companies to host their data upon, and there have been no leaks of data stored in AWS…

People said the same about Apple, and then it turned out to be bullshit.[0] And, big surprise, their customers did not seem to hold them accountable. So in the end, paying for stuff just shows that you're a more valuable product to sell. And gives them a great primary key to track you by. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22106536

>People said the same about Apple, and then it turned out to be bullshit.

I don't understand this claim at all. It's always been clear that if your paranoid about the state, to turn off iCloud backups. And it's not like Apple is selling your backups either.

Re: Stop donating your customers' data to Google Analytics

#103

Post by rgbrenner »

whoisjuan wrote: post #93
adreamingsoul wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or is that wishful thinking? AWS and Amazon are in the buisness of collecting, storing, and processing data.

AWS mining their customer's data is a huge liability for their cloud business and a blatant violation of their service agreements. Something that would fundamentally break the concept of using cloud services like AWS or Azure. This is why this comparison doesn't make sense. Google Analytics is a 3rd party service where you have no control at all of your data. You put a script of your app, and then you basically funne…

There is one exception to this that I know of: AWS Rekognition will re-use the faces you scan with it for training and "to improve and develop the quality of Amazon Rekognition and other Amazon machine-learning/artificial-intelligence technologies." That's so vague, they can reuse it anywhere Amazon (not just AWS) uses machine learning.

You can opt out though.

First point under Data Privacy: https://aws.amazon.com/rekognition/faqs/

Re: Stop donating your customers' data to Google Analytics

#104

Post by dvko »

gramakri wrote: post #70
eldridgea wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a fan of Fathom[0]. The amount of data and insight is light compared to GA and others but if it meets your needs it's pretty great. [0] https://github.com/usefathom/fathom

Do you know if fathom will remain opensource and/or self-hostable ? ( https://github.com/usefathom/fathom/issues/268 )

The open-source (self-hosted) version of Fathom is dead. The only commits they have been pushing to it in the last 12 months have been upsells for their closed-source & centralized paid offering.

Re: Stop donating your customers' data to Google Analytics

#105

Post by dvko »

rapnie wrote: post #9
coldcode wrote: post #6

It would be handy if people listed here all the alternatives that don't steal your customer info.

https://usefathom.com/ https://goaccess.io/ https://github.com/NYPL/google-analytics-proxy http://matomo.org/ https://ackee.electerious.com/ https://www.goatcounter.com/ https://count.ly/

If you're using WordPress, there is https://wordpress.org/plugins/koko-analytics/. Open-source, self hosted, no external services & very performant.

Re: Stop donating your customers' data to Google Analytics

#106

Post by Carpetsmoker »

pixelbath wrote: post #67

I see a lot of suggestions for free or open-source analytics packages, but I would refrain from recommending anything you haven't personally used. I've tried to separate myself from Google in various ways, and one of those was to replace Google Analytics with open source software. I tried several; they're all either non-functional out of the box, or require significant time investment to even start approaching Google…

> require significant time investment to even start approaching Google Analytics.

I think that for a lot of the "alternative" analytics tools, feature parity with Google Analytics isn't necessarily a goal, so this may explain your disappointment. I think the only exception here is Matomo, which is the only "advanced" OSS analytics as far as I know.

Re: Stop donating your customers' data to Google Analytics

#108

Post by drusepth »

rapnie wrote: post #9
coldcode wrote: post #6

It would be handy if people listed here all the alternatives that don't steal your customer info.

https://usefathom.com/ https://goaccess.io/ https://github.com/NYPL/google-analytics-proxy http://matomo.org/ https://ackee.electerious.com/ https://www.goatcounter.com/ https://count.ly/

I think including prices in this list would significantly improve it.

Re: Stop donating your customers' data to Google Analytics

#109

Post by SkyBelow »

Carpetsmoker wrote: post #106
pixelbath wrote: post #67

I see a lot of suggestions for free or open-source analytics packages, but I would refrain from recommending anything you haven't personally used. I've tried to separate myself from Google in various ways, and one of those was to replace Google Analytics with open source software. I tried several; they're all either non-functional out of the box, or require significant time investment to even start approaching Google…

> require significant time investment to even start approaching Google Analytics. I think that for a lot of the "alternative" analytics tools, feature parity with Google Analytics isn't necessarily a goal, so this may explain your disappointment. I think the only exception here is Matomo, which is the only "advanced" OSS analytics as far as I know.

That's swell and all, but you are going to find businesses still going to Google Analytics because it is easy to setup and free. The cost to consumers by having their data shared everywhere isn't even thought on the horizon.

Re: Stop donating your customers' data to Google Analytics

#110

Post by Carpetsmoker »

SkyBelow wrote: post #109
Carpetsmoker wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> require significant time investment to even start approaching Google Analytics. I think that for a lot of the "alternative" analytics tools, feature parity with Google Analytics isn't necessarily a goal, so this may explain your disappointment. I think the only exception here is Matomo, which is the only "advanced" OSS analytics as far as I know.

That's swell and all, but you are going to find businesses still going to Google Analytics because it is easy to setup and free. The cost to consumers by having their data shared everywhere isn't even thought on the horizon.

I'm not ever sure how that comment even relates to mine. I just explained the goals of various OSS project as I understand them. I never said anything about setup costs or price.
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