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We ditched Google Analytics

spideroak.com

211–220 of 273 posts

Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spideroak doesn't and cannot dedupe, since everything you upload is encrypted by a key held only by you.

Spideroak can and does dedupe client side before uploading. It can't dedupe across multiple clients, but it does dedupe within the client. It also tracks syncs so that data synced between multiple client machines only has to be stored once (with appropriate redundancy).

That explains why the data are visualized the way they are in the view menu :)

Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#212
post #43

Not strictly on topic so I apologise if this is unwanted but I thought I'd share my experience with SpiderOak in case anyone here was thinking of purchasing one of their plans. In February SpiderOak dropped its pricing to $12/month for 1TB of data. Having several hundred gigabytes of photos to backup I took advantage and bought a year long subscription ($129). I had access to a symmetric gigabit fibre connection so I…

This has been my experience as well, not to mention how much the client slowed down my machine. It's been really slow going but the client is getting better. I never tried doing the encryption on my side, though, they also do diffs on each file you upload so I imagine that has something to do with the lag. I still use spideroak, they're the only company I'm aware of that encrypts locally and also has done a lot to pr…

There are other backup applications that encrypt locally before sending to server. Two examples are https://www.tarsnap.com/ and https://www.haystacksoftware.com/

Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#213
post #11

Is it just me or is this a click-bait title with hollow content?

Well, the title says they stopped using Google analytics, and the article explained that they stopped using Google analytics, why they did it, and what they're doing instead. You may not find it interesting, but the title clearly reflects the content, so I'm not sure how it's click bait.

Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://snowplowanalytics.com/ is worth considering if you have larger volumes of traffic

Why not for low volume sites?

Well it takes lots of time to setup + needs a few extra server like event collector, log cleanup and enrich, data loading and database server.

Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#215
post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being paid for doing work by those who need the work done is the opposite of "extracting rent".

Being paid for doing work has nothing to do with extracting rent , which is the practice of inserting yourself as a middleman so other people have to pay you "rent"[1] where none should be required. The entire idea behind writing a Service as a Software Substitute[2] is about extracting rent. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking [2] http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-se...

Perhaps you should have read that wikipedia page before so helpfully linking to it. There's nothing about "middlemen" there. "Rent" is political economy jargon; it's not just a synonym for "distasteful practices". Adam Smith wasn't complaining about shopkeepers or shipping companies, and he certainly wasn't talking about "back end" software services. There is no royal decree enforcing how such services shall be provided. If you don't like AWS then use GCP.

Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#216
post #210
post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>> I never quite grasp how the above isn't just a matter of intuition to anyone working in the tech sector. Google Analytics thrives on developers' laziness in my opinion. Ah, the "not invented here" syndrome! There are tons of things that you could do "in a couple of weeks" that more or less work. However, it doesn't mean you have to or even that it would be a good idea. If all developers adopted the attitude that…

The answer is open source. Where is the wordpress to google's analytics product?

Piwik, Snowplow, etc. They do exist.

Then the question is do you really want to maintain the infrastructure required to run the analytics smoothly? Especially if your company has dozens of millions of pageviews a month and depends on the real time needs (extra infrastructure to support that).

Are you familiar enough with the stack so you could have a high degree of confidence that you can fix productions issues which are inevitable? Quite often, an honest answer here is 'no'. Then can you afford to lose a few hours/days/weeks (whatever it would take to fix the issue) of data? Again, often the answer here is 'no'.

Of course, you have hosted solutions. But they are no better than GA in terms of privacy.

Paid support exists too but the cost can skyrocket pretty quickly, on top of paying for the infrastructure and maintaining it.

Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#217
post #103

> It took us only a few weeks to write our home-brew analytics package. Unfortunately, there's no way to replicate what Google Analytics currently offers (for free!) within a couple of weeks (or even months). Not with big data sets. Yes, GA does enforce sampling if you don't pay for GA Premium, but the free edition is still one of hell of a deal (if you don't care about privacy). If you only use Google Analytics as a…

I suspect most of the people saying "you don't need Google Analytics! Do it yourself!" have never used GA for anything that meaningful. As you begin to really familiarize yourself with your website traffic and understand how to look at your clickstream data in a more investigative an analytical way, you'll start to see how nice GA is and how easy it is to answer your questions.

You also underestimate how ubiquitous GA is because it's free and extremely popular. I'd consider myself an intermediate to advanced user of GA, but for people less experienced, I can easily share stuff with them for complicated tasks or they know how to do a lot of the basics themselves.

In hiring digital marketing people, GA is pretty much on par with Word in terms of familiarity. It's something a lot of people have a basic competence with.

Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#218
post #43

Not strictly on topic so I apologise if this is unwanted but I thought I'd share my experience with SpiderOak in case anyone here was thinking of purchasing one of their plans. In February SpiderOak dropped its pricing to $12/month for 1TB of data. Having several hundred gigabytes of photos to backup I took advantage and bought a year long subscription ($129). I had access to a symmetric gigabit fibre connection so I…

This comment is ridiculous, and so is the fact that it's at the top. This is supposed to be about Google Analytics, come on.

It is off-topic, yes. For me personally it was very valuable however since I’m in the market for a backup application, and I will definitely take Veratyr’s comment into consideration when choosing between the available offerings.

Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#219

>why does Google and their advertisers need to know about it I would ask Google is pretty clear about this. The only reason they track you is for advertising, and there isn't any evidence of them using the info for anything else. In fact there is a lot of evidence pointing the other way, such as their insistence on encryption data flowing between their datacenters. This is Google we are talking about, not Kazakhstan,…

Google could eventually use this information to determine your eligibility for a home loan. They have already dipped their toes in this area [1]. With all this data, we have to ensure that it is used fairly (or not at all). There is enough concern about digital redlining that a 2014 report to the white house reports on this [2]. As we know machine learning is quite capable inferring sensitive attributes [3].

This inference doesn't even need to be intentional, machine learning is capable of accidentally picking up on latent variables. Even if your neighborhood (the original redlining) isn't a feature in the original variable, it could be inferred from the other variables.

TL;DR: Your surfing behavior could be used to deny you a home loan one day.

[1] http://techcrunch.com/2015/11/23/google-launches-mortgage-sh...

[2] https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/docs/big_data...

[3] http://www.pnas.org/content/110/15/5802.abstract

Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#220
post #43

Not strictly on topic so I apologise if this is unwanted but I thought I'd share my experience with SpiderOak in case anyone here was thinking of purchasing one of their plans. In February SpiderOak dropped its pricing to $12/month for 1TB of data. Having several hundred gigabytes of photos to backup I took advantage and bought a year long subscription ($129). I had access to a symmetric gigabit fibre connection so I…

Could the issue be caused by bad peering between your ISPs?

If that was the case I'd expect the upload to be consistent but slow. Since it was intermittent, I believe it's an app issue.
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