a few weeks ago my blood needed a checkup.
They sent me the results by mail.
The results where on a non password protected but 'unguessable' url. And the page ofcourse contained google analytics, I'm in the EU, I wonder if this is legal
Stop donating your customers' data to Google Analytics
121–130 of 163 posts
Re: Stop donating your customers' data to Google Analytics
#122a few weeks ago my blood needed a checkup. They sent me the results by mail. The results where on a non password protected but 'unguessable' url. And the page ofcourse contained google analytics, I'm in the EU, I wonder if this is legal
If they haven’t notified you, and hence you can’t/didn’t comply, it probably isn’t. Especially medical companies are scrutinized for following gdpr. You could make a case here to either the companies privacy officer, or your countries privacy watchdog.
Re: Stop donating your customers' data to Google Analytics
#123I 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…
I'm building an analytics service and thank you for the feedback! I'm currently building a service that's nearly as fast as Google Analytics and simple as can be (although there's going to be a tone of new features soon). Here's the link: https://sdan.io/pingpong . If you want to signup/give feed back, I would greatly appreciate if you do so: https://forms.gle/MhojBWWfdiWjZatC7 !
This caught my eye:
https://storage.googleapis.com/pingponganalytics/pingone.js
So... I should install a script that loads from Google servers?
Apart from that, you probably don't want to tie yourself to google like that. Once the users have this in their pages they will _never_ update it. You should use your own domain.
Re: Stop donating your customers' data to Google Analytics
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've been surprised lately by how much more pleasant, readable and usable the news/blog-web is with JavaScript turned off. JavaScript is basically just used for the user-hostile ad-tech.
I've been wondering about this recently: perhaps we'd actually be better off with simpler browsers that did less so that the websites would do less?
It's why I'm somewhat against WASM, even though it's very cool from a technical standpoint. It makes the web even more of an operating system, where I'd like it to be less.
Re: Stop donating your customers' data to Google Analytics
#125I 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…
Please also bear in mind that any developer's personal time (whether your own or someone else's), while important and valuable - is also a trade-off against the aggregated time and value of your users' privacy.
... which, if users actually valued, they'd signal by ceasing to use one's site.
There is basically no strong indication right now of any large segment of users boycotting sites because the users care about privacy. There's the same small amount that have always been present and the number doesn't appear to be growing.
Re: Stop donating your customers' data to Google Analytics
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or is that wishful thinking? AWS and Amazon are in the buisness of collecting, storing, and processing data.
Can you provide a citation about that with AWS and its customers? Amazon itself, I have no problem believing (and have seen it in action. However, AWS is run separately from Amazon('s storefront, specifically). If AWS were really aggregating customer's data stored in AWS' platform, I think we'd be seeing a lot more about it in the news. And there would be a lot more than just Walmart advocating against its use.
Is that relevant? Nobody can provide such a citation for Google Cloud Platform either; the discussion is entirely around reputation of the parent company, not what the company claims it does with cloud services.
Re: Stop donating your customers' data to Google Analytics
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
This is a tech oriented forum where we’re (as a group) more privacy conscious and more generally aware of how things are stored than the general public. And yet even here, there is widespread surprise at the news that iCloud backups are not fully encrypted in such a way that keeps them private from Apple. If we (as a group) have in some factions been caught by surprise, what are the chances that the general public ar…
>And yet even here, there is widespread surprise at the news that iCloud backups are not fully encrypted in such a way that keeps them private from Apple.
Anyone who thought Apple kept iCloud backups fully encrypted was being willfully ignorant. Apple has been fully open to the fact that they share iCloud backups with the FBI, this exact same situation happened in the San Bernardino case where Apple provided the backups but the FBI cried about how they wouldn’t unlock the phone.
The tinfoil hat advice has always been to turn off iCloud backups. I don’t buy that anyone privacy conscious should have missed the fact that even Snowden was saying “use an iPhone but turn off iCloud backups” for the last several years.
If you got caught by surprise, then you weren’t paying attention. Apple wasn’t keeping it a secret that they would share your backups with law enforcement. The only reason this is possible is because today they don’t require you to enter a password to restore your iPhone to a new phone. Even the way the technology works today implies that Apple can read your iCloud backups without you knowing.
Re: Stop donating your customers' data to Google Analytics
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can probably use the "tracking pixel" method with at least some analytics tools. This is a very old which probably predates even the invention of JavaScript. Basically, if it accepts a GET with query parameters, it should work.
Right, but don't you still need to own a server in order to log these GET requests?
You can do it with one of the hosted services. I don't know which ones support it exactly, but GoatCounter does (although it's kind of an undocumented feature until I merge PR #122).
Re: Stop donating your customers' data to Google Analytics
#129Yeah right, stop using GA and start using Amazon analytics. Very good suggestion.
Re: Stop donating your customers' data to Google Analytics
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just a shot in the dark, but if you use Cloudflare already, their stats include view counts. It's also probably more accurate than relying on JS tracking tools because they can count the actual requests to your site.
My CloudFlare stats show multiple times as many hits as GA. I'm guessing it's not handling bots/spiders or something.
We put this down to people with JavaScript disabled or ad blockers. CF does filter bot traffic but will capture all hits as it’s tracking through network requests. For us it’s around a 35% increase in what GA reports.