151–160 of 173 posts
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As a founder in this space, it not as bad as you think. There are niches in this crowded yet broad space. Plausible - good for self-hosting, but their SaaS is very expensive and FOSS vs SaaS offering differ. Ahrefs - they will use your traffic to improve your competitor research, you really should use them cautiously. Matomo - feature rich but can be overwhelming. Posthog - its SaaS is US based so dismissed early by…
Just for the record, I use PostHog in my Europe-based startup. They have a EU region so it’s not a problem for us.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a founder in this space, it not as bad as you think. There are niches in this crowded yet broad space. Plausible - good for self-hosting, but their SaaS is very expensive and FOSS vs SaaS offering differ. Ahrefs - they will use your traffic to improve your competitor research, you really should use them cautiously. Matomo - feature rich but can be overwhelming. Posthog - its SaaS is US based so dismissed early by…
Just for the record, I use PostHog in my Europe-based startup. They have a EU region so it’s not a problem for us.
A couple of days ago I was researching website analytics and GDPR/cookie law, and it seems clear that you need user consent even if IP addresses are only processed or temporarily stored before being discarded. Arguing otherwise is like claiming it’s legal to steal from a store as long as you return the goods the next day - it’s legal fantasy. I don’t think the EU is eager to go after these “ethical” analytics compani…
Can you elaborate?
A couple of days ago I was researching website analytics and GDPR/cookie law, and it seems clear that you need user consent even if IP addresses are only processed or temporarily stored before being discarded. Arguing otherwise is like claiming it’s legal to steal from a store as long as you return the goods the next day - it’s legal fantasy. I don’t think the EU is eager to go after these “ethical” analytics compani…
> it seems clear that Can you elaborate?
You don’t get to “undo” this requirement by discarding the IP address afterwards, the law doesn’t care.
Others have come to the same conclusion: https://github.com/plausible/analytics/discussions/1963
The market for Google Analytics alternatives is crowded. There's Plausible, Ahrefs web analytics, onedollarstats.com, PostHog, Matomo, Unami, Grafana, Microsoft Clarity (free at any scale), and so many others. Despite minor differences these products all compete for the same users (e.g. if someone is a PostHog customer they probably won't be using Ahref web analytics) yet most of these companies offer generous free t…
As a founder in this space, it not as bad as you think. There are niches in this crowded yet broad space. Plausible - good for self-hosting, but their SaaS is very expensive and FOSS vs SaaS offering differ. Ahrefs - they will use your traffic to improve your competitor research, you really should use them cautiously. Matomo - feature rich but can be overwhelming. Posthog - its SaaS is US based so dismissed early by…
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This is pretty spot on. There's a couple of dimensions the major players sit on, and there's enough combinations that there's plenty of space for smaller players to survive in. I'm not super familiar with all of these products, so some of these ratings will be based on vibes 1-----------------10 OSS Proprietary Small business Enterprise Simplicity Complexity Web analytics Product analytics Privacy No privacy # Rybbit…
This really does look like a great project! Is it possible to use it server-side only, with no JavaScript required? I currently use Umami like that - it has an API, so I can send it page view events and custom events from server-side code. That means analytics can't be disabled by uBlock or the like, or by disabling JavaScript.
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Potentially yes, but depends very much on the privacy policy and data handling promises being made. I think the instinct to distrust big companies is at least partly because many of them have already proven not to be good stewards of data which when combined with their scale has more worrisome implications. With a smaller/newer player, at least there’s some hope that they’re not capable of the same harms at a smaller…
Startup have high chance being acquired. The new owner will get all your data, no matter you trust them or not.
It’d be nice to have products that aren’t created with the aim of being acquired, and/or companies that remain committed to their original mission.
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> it seems clear that Can you elaborate?
The logic is simple, as soon as you collected and/or processed IP addresses, you need user consent as it is personal data. You don’t get to “undo” this requirement by discarding the IP address afterwards, the law doesn’t care. Others have come to the same conclusion: https://github.com/plausible/analytics/discussions/1963
> Arguing otherwise is like claiming it’s legal to steal from a store as long as you return the goods the next day - it’s legal fantasy.
That said, this strongly implies that these privacy-focused analytics platforms are unquestionably breaking the GDPR and behaving in an unethical way, but that seems like a huge overstatement.
I've read the linked blog post and it seems like the analysis hinges on the precise wording of the ePD rather than GDPR. By their own admission, these analytics solutions seem to be in line with both the letter and the spirit of GDPR. The author even agrees that the wording of the ePD should be addressed and notes:
> Unfortunately I came to the rather demotivating conclusion that there simply isn’t any way to implement web analytics without running afoul of the ePrivacy Directive.
> This was a surprising conclusion at the time. Morally we can go very far: we can put a lot of smart stuff together and create a system that can’t be used to track individual users. But legally, that doesn’t particularly matter. The ePrivacy Directive is written as it is.
> Even the EU Data Protection Working Party decries this. In their 2012 opinion they write:
> the Working Party considers that first party analytics cookies are not likely to create a privacy risk when they are strictly limited to first party aggregated statistical purposes and when they are used by websites that already provide clear information about these cookies in their privacy policy as well as adequate privacy safeguards. […] In this regard, should article 5.3 of the Directive 2002/58/EC be re-visited in the future, the European legislator might appropriately add a third exemption criterion to consent for cookies that are strictly limited to first party anonymized and aggregated statistical purposes.
So it's not that these companies are doing anything inherently immoral or unethical as far as their handling of personal data goes, but they might be behaving unethically by making claims that run afoul of other legislation (ePD) that clashes with the GDPR.