And firebase analytics is much the same as GA right? In fact I think it’s even viewed on the GA portal.
Stop donating your customers' data to Google Analytics
21–30 of 163 posts
Re: Stop donating your customers' data to Google Analytics
#22The headline is wrong, it should be changed to "Stop donating your customers' data to Google Analytics ... donate to another large corporation instead!" There are much better options out there. Quite apart from the solutions listed in these comments, a better option is to reconsider whether you really need analytics at all. Maybe the answer is yes if you are a business trying to understand your customers. But not eve…
Or you could write the 10 lines of JavaScript that'll do what 99% of people use Google analytics for
Re: Stop donating your customers' data to Google Analytics
#23The headline is wrong, it should be changed to "Stop donating your customers' data to Google Analytics ... donate to another large corporation instead!" There are much better options out there. Quite apart from the solutions listed in these comments, a better option is to reconsider whether you really need analytics at all. Maybe the answer is yes if you are a business trying to understand your customers. But not eve…
Or you could write the 10 lines of JavaScript that'll do what 99% of people use Google analytics for
Feel free to post those lines
Re: Stop donating your customers' data to Google Analytics
#24And firebase analytics is much the same as GA right? In fact I think it’s even viewed on the GA portal.
Connecting Firebase to Google Analytics is optional, for now.
Re: Stop donating your customers' data to Google Analytics
#25I have created a simple workflow using AWS Lambda + Kinesis + S3 to track our customers and not to have any 3rd party dependency. It took roughly 2 weeks but it is worth it since do not leak customer data and we have much tighter control over what we collect (no PII except the source ip that gets hashed in the process).
Re: Stop donating your customers' data to Google Analytics
#26The headline is wrong, it should be changed to "Stop donating your customers' data to Google Analytics ... donate to another large corporation instead!" There are much better options out there. Quite apart from the solutions listed in these comments, a better option is to reconsider whether you really need analytics at all. Maybe the answer is yes if you are a business trying to understand your customers. But not eve…
Or you could write the 10 lines of JavaScript that'll do what 99% of people use Google analytics for
If you think you can replicate that with 10 lines you have no idea what Google Analytics is used for.
Re: Stop donating your customers' data to Google Analytics
#27Interesting that the page breaks if you're using Adblock because of Google Analytics being in the URL.
Shows me a fun 'You are not connected to the internet' page that lets you doodle on the page.
Re: Stop donating your customers' data to Google Analytics
#28It would be handy if people listed here all the alternatives that don't steal your customer info.
Or just use server log analytics. Client-side analytics are a significant contributor to the proliferation of JavaScript bloat and unnecessary 3rd party cookies.
Re: Stop donating your customers' data to Google Analytics
#29The suggested Google Analytics implementation today is a collection of three separate Google technologies: the original GA, Doubleclick cookies to track demographics and interest, and Tag Manager to manage them. The original GA does not give Google useful cross-site user data because it uses only first-party cookies and anonymizes data as it collected it. To my knowledge you can still implement GA this way If you wan…
> anonymizes data as it collected it
No, they don't anonymize the collected data (for any reasonable definition of "anonymous". The IP address alone gives GA a very close approximation of a unique key, and their own documentation[1] explains the "anonymization" process:
"... the last octet of the user IP address
is set to zero ..."
The 8 least significant hits of an IPv4 address are the least interesting. The remaining 24 bits gives GA the ASN and is a lot of entropy for fingerprinting. It would be trivial to recover a unique key from the "anonymized" address by combining it with other analytics data, other cookies, timestamps.
[1] https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/2763052?hl=en
Re: Stop donating your customers' data to Google Analytics
#30It would be handy if people listed here all the alternatives that don't steal your customer info.
Or roll your own: https://www.pcmaffey.com/roll-your-own-analytics