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Use of Google Analytics declared illegal by French data protection authority

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Re: Use of Google Analytics declared illegal by French data protection authority

#111

Post by wizzwizz4 »

TekMol wrote: post #103
wizzwizz4 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google Analytics is hugely overrated. Most people don't use it properly, many browsers block it entirely , and you can usually do a better job just by looking at server logs.

Saying so just tells me that you never been analyzing and optimizing websites with millions of users. Websites on which a whole company depends on. It would be a crazy approach to try and do it via server logs.

Actually, there are some nice tools (e.g. GoAccess) that produce pretty graphs. The vast majority of people just want pretty graphs; the more fancy data Google Analytics produces is nowhere near as accurate as the number of trailing non-zero digits would have you believe.

Depending on your userbase, the regular traffic data can be off by significant proportions. I've seen pages where the number of logged-in interactions are higher than the number of Google Analytics hits.

Re: Use of Google Analytics declared illegal by French data protection authority

#112

Post by estaseuropano »

TekMol wrote: post #89

Google Analytics is the best analytics tool out there. By getting their companies off GA, European governments are weakening their industry. This probably holds true for many SAAS products. Many of the best are from the USA. Forbidding European companies to use them is a desaster for the European internet industry.

For whom and what purpose is it the best?

There are many niche systems that fit specific purposes. Sure GA can benefit from scale and existing profiles with user data gatherer in other context, which a self-hosted solution would not have acces to. But does it address every need better than specific systems? And is the added benefit worth sacrificing your users' data to google?

Re: Use of Google Analytics declared illegal by French data protection authority

#113

Post by 14 »

TekMol wrote: post #89

Google Analytics is the best analytics tool out there. By getting their companies off GA, European governments are weakening their industry. This probably holds true for many SAAS products. Many of the best are from the USA. Forbidding European companies to use them is a desaster for the European internet industry.

You see it as weakening others will see it as strengthening.

Re: Use of Google Analytics declared illegal by French data protection authority

#114

Post by Rygian »

ssijak wrote: post #42

So I can take follow someone in public, take picture of them in public places from some distance, follow them into stores, see what they are spending and what they are using, etc. Store owners can have cameras, track the behaviour of customers, etc But if I use a service which anonymously tracks which pages they opened on a website they voluntarily visited and are exploring, then I'm in trouble?

> if I use a service which anonymously tracks

Wrong. Google Analytics (at least v3 by default) tracks IP addresses, which are considered personal information. [1]

[1] https://www.cookielawinfo.com/anonymize-ip-in-google-analyti...

Re: Use of Google Analytics declared illegal by French data protection authority

#115

Post by bovermyer »

TekMol wrote: post #103
wizzwizz4 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google Analytics is hugely overrated. Most people don't use it properly, many browsers block it entirely , and you can usually do a better job just by looking at server logs.

Saying so just tells me that you never been analyzing and optimizing websites with millions of users. Websites on which a whole company depends on. It would be a crazy approach to try and do it via server logs.

Server logs aren't the only alternative to Google Analytics. Matomo, Plausible, and Fathom are all perfectly viable.

Re: Use of Google Analytics declared illegal by French data protection authority

#116

Post by jeroenhd »

rascul wrote: post #84
AndrewDucker wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Put up a static website and you're fine. Collect people's data (and that's what a user analytics system does) and then you're responsible for it, and you have to follow the rules.

Static websites can collect data too. Lots of stuff can go into web server logs.

And web server logs are fine for troubleshooting and detecting abuse, you don't even need to ask for consent!

Only things like tracking, ads, and sending data to areas without equivalent privacy laws are forbidden. The intent and usage of the collected information is a big part of what is and isn't allowed.

Re: Use of Google Analytics declared illegal by French data protection authority

#117

Post by XCSme »

aftergibson wrote: post #11

Is anyone using an alternative that provides some basic analytics and isn't likely to get me in legal hot water in the future? I've already offloaded Google Fonts due to the German ruling. I'm happy to self-host piwik if needed, but could that fall foul of regulators?

I think that self-hosting is the way to go, get a server in your own region/country and don't send the data to any 3rd party.

Re: Use of Google Analytics declared illegal by French data protection authority

#118

Post by wizzwizz4 »

dewey wrote: post #110
wizzwizz4 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google Analytics is hugely overrated. Most people don't use it properly, many browsers block it entirely , and you can usually do a better job just by looking at server logs.

> and you can usually do a better job just by looking at server logs Yes, if you only want to count visits and don't have a problem having all bot traffic included. For everything a bit more advanced you need a proper analytics tool.

Filtering out bot traffic is easy enough with server logs. A self-hosted JavaScript analytics tool gives you more data, but Google Analytics filters out Firefox users too; contrary to ReCAPTCHA's apparent beliefs, Firefox users are mostly not bots.

Re: Use of Google Analytics declared illegal by French data protection authority

#119

Post by XCSme »

pl0x wrote: post #98

What is the balance of privacy and analytics when even privacy friendly tools like Plausible are blocked.

I think the main thing is not to send your customers' data to third-parties without their consent. It's usually fine if you use internally analytics for the purpose of running the company, it's not fine if you send those data to other companies that use it for marketing purposes.

Re: Use of Google Analytics declared illegal by French data protection authority

#120

Post by nickjj »

calyhre wrote: post #34
aftergibson wrote: post #11

Is anyone using an alternative that provides some basic analytics and isn't likely to get me in legal hot water in the future? I've already offloaded Google Fonts due to the German ruling. I'm happy to self-host piwik if needed, but could that fall foul of regulators?

I've been using [Plausible]( https://plausible.io ) in its self-hosted version for about a month, on a 7M+ page views per month. So far so good

What type of server specs (memory, CPU, disk size, etc.) do you use to self host it?

Based on an open issue[0], it's suggested to run a server with 32GB+ of memory to handle hosting Clickhouse but that would mean self hosting Plausible would end up being $160 / month on DigitalOcean which would make it 10x more expensive than hosting my custom app that I want to see analytics for.

I know you can use less memory but it sounds like using less can result in an unpredictable environment where everything can stop working at any given moment depending on what Clickhouse wants to do. This happened to someone who replied in that issue. Their production set up stopped working because it ran out of memory.

Someone else wrote about it using close to 8GB of disk space to track ~8k page views at https://cyberhost.uk/plausible-3-month-review/. That was only written back in March 2021 too. They said they are going to look for an alternative solution because the the storage costs are too high.

[0]: https://github.com/plausible/docs/issues/67

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