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Show HN: I made a privacy-first minimalist Google Analytics

simpleanalytics.io

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Re: Show HN: I made a privacy-first minimalist Google Analytics

#111

Post by mdasen »

First: really slick site. I'm not so into the video which takes a while to get to the point, but the site makes it really easy to understand the point of your product (and that's something a lot of sites lack).

I do have some questions/comments and I apologize if they seem a bit rapid-fire.

* When I look at the "Top Pages", there are links. When I click the link, it brings me to that page on your site not a chart of hits for that page. Is that how it's meant to work?

* If I sign up for your service, do my stats become public? https://simpleanalytics.io/apple.com just says "This domain does not have any data yet" (presumably because Apple doesn't have your script installed). But that kinda indicates that any domain with your script installed would show up there. It might just be an error in the messaging, but probably something to fix.

* What's your backend like? I'm mostly curious because analytics at scale isn't an easy problem. Do you write to a log-structured system with high availability (like Kafka) and then process asynchronously? How do you handle making the chart of visitors? Do you roll up the stats periodically?

* Speaking of scale, if I started sending thousands or tens of thousands of requests per second at you, would that be bad? Is this more targeted at small sites?

* What do you do about bots? Bot traffic can be a large source of traffic that throws off numbers.

* How long before numbers are available? It's September 19th, but the last stats on the live demo are September 18th. Is it lagged by a day?

* Do you not want to track user-agents for privacy reasons as well? Seems like a UA doesn't really identify anyone, but it can be useful for determining if you want to support a browser.

* You're not counting anyone that has the "Do Not Track" header. To me, DNT is more about tracking than counting (which is different). Even if you counted my hit, it wouldn't be tracking me if you didn't record information like IP address and there were no cookies.

Kudos for launching something. I think my biggest suggestions would be fixing the live-demo page so it doesn't look like it's leaking other site's data and providing some guidance about limits. It's easy to think that you don't want to put limits on people, but any architecture is made with a certain scale in mind. There's no shame in that. Sometimes what you want is a "let us know if you need more than X" message. At the very least, it lets you prepare. People sometimes use products in ways you wouldn't imagine and ways you didn't intend which the system doesn't handle gracefully.

Good luck with your product!

Re: Show HN: I made a privacy-first minimalist Google Analytics

#112

Post by dividuum »

pdkl95 wrote: post #91
thesimon wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not private enough as the space of IP addresses is too small. Removing the last octet of IPv4 addresses before storing them should provide better privacy.

> Removing the last octet of IPv4 addresses before storing them should provide better privacy. That doesn't provide any practical amount of privacy. For a longer discussion of why this is at best a placebo, see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17170468

I solved this my SaaS by internally logging all the requests and then using the Measurement Protocol (https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection...) to send them from the server-side. While doing that I also set the last digit to 0 and unify user agents and other data that's not important for me.

Re: Show HN: I made a privacy-first minimalist Google Analytics

#113

Post by dvko »

lucideer wrote: post #36
harianus wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- No plans to go open source with the backend, but I do show the code that is run in the browser. The visualisation of the data is not super important I think. - I don't save IP's, not even in the logs. - I don't have unique pageviews at the moment. I will in the future. If the referrer is the same as the current page, I will measure that as a non-unique. What do you think?

> What do you think? Apart from the unfortunate non-open-source answer, this sounds great! I get others' concerns about wanting unique pageviews, but that metric is always a bit of a sketchy either-or for extremely privacy-conscious people. It's both an incredibly valuable metric, and also one that's difficult to square with complete privacy (basically it's always going to be pseudonymous at best).

If you need an open-source solution that truly cares about privacy yet can still keep track of unique pageviews, there's always Fathom Analytics (https://github.com/usefathom/fathom).

Re: Show HN: I made a privacy-first minimalist Google Analytics

#114

Post by mygo »

pdkl95 wrote: post #88
AdriaanvRossum wrote: post #2

Creator here. As a developer, I install analytics for clients, but I never feel comfortable installing Google Analytics because Google creates profiles for their visitors, and uses their information for apps (like AdWords). As we all know, big corporations unnecessarily track users without their consent. I want to change that. So I built Simple Analytics. To ensure that it's fast, secure, and stable, I built it entir…

> unnecessarily track users without their consent Regardless of your intentions, you are collecting enough data to track users. > I am transparent about what I collect ([URL]) That page doesn't mention that you are also collecting (and make no claim about storing) the globally-visible IP address (and any other data in the IP and TCP headers). This can be uniquely identifying; even when it isn't unique you usually onl…

> That page doesn't mention that you are also collecting (and make no claim about storing) the globally-visible IP address

I’m not the OP, but where is there evidence that they’re storing the IP? Sure it’s in the headers that they process but that doesn’t mean they’re storing it.

Re: Show HN: I made a privacy-first minimalist Google Analytics

#115

Post by dvko »

saudioger wrote: post #46
teddyh wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Matomo has both “cloud-hosted” and self-hosted options. What is the advantage to using this compared to Matomo’s “cloud-hosting”?

I guess you're not paying Matomo and don't need to have another company controlling your data?

But you're paying a closed-source and for-profit company instead, so how exactly is that better than Matomo or Fathom?

Re: Show HN: I made a privacy-first minimalist Google Analytics

#118

Post by petemill »

Screen sizes is ambiguous here - are you measuring viewport width (`window.innerWidth` - helpful) or the display the window happens to be on (not too helpful)? Also something to make that data useful would be show the range of sizes, instead of the top specific size. E.g. 1280 may be _the most popular_ but there may be more users using larger width windows, just more variation in those sizes (1320, 1440, etc), so a top level range could be a nice differentiator here.

But, how useful are these stats going to be without being able to see user journeys through a path of pages / actions? Yes, it's good to know which pages are getting how many views. But, in order to improve the UX, we often need to know how many users are able to go from Page A to Page C and whether they went through Page B first. Or e.g. if 90% of sessions that start on Page A (so we know what their purpose was), end on Page B but the main (perhaps beneficial) action for the user was on Page C. You can't just look at the pageviews for each, because you don't know where the session started.

I fear that this would reduce people to "inferring" (guessing) too much about the data that they see, and making decisions they feel are backed with data when there's not enough data to conclude. Then again, I'm sure that happens when the data is there too :-)

Re: Show HN: I made a privacy-first minimalist Google Analytics

#120

Post by SahAssar »

sleepyhead wrote: post #66
xrisk wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The IP address isn't stored though.

I don't think that is relevant. What matters is that it is transferred to a third-party. And regardless if it is stored in a database, the servers are still processing the data (and maybe storing the log of it).

At least under GDPR the relevant question is if it is stored and who it is shared with. So if it is not stored/shared then it should be fine legally.
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