For those who look for an alternative https://plausible.io is a great replacement.
Or if you're after free analytics, Cloudflare has something. Should be GDPR compliant since they don't use cookies or local storage.
Companies must stop using Google Analytics
31–40 of 672 posts
Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics
#32For those who look for an alternative https://plausible.io is a great replacement.
Or if you're after free analytics, Cloudflare has something. Should be GDPR compliant since they don't use cookies or local storage.
GDPR has nothing to do with cookies or local storage. They are just mediums that are potentially impacted by GDPR.
GDPR simply makes collecting personal data without consent illegal. This is why a lot of American centric sites block us from accessing them, they want your data, and they don't want to ask for it.
Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics
#33I put Google Analytics on my forum because I thought that maybe having it would help it be found in Google Search.
Google Lighthouse immediately started pissing and bitching about slow page load times because it had to wait for Google Analytics to load.
My site still does not really show up much in Google Search.
I binned Google Analytics because it basically did fuck all of any use.
I don't have one of those fucking idiotic cookie popups, because it doesn't need one, no-one needs one, and they're entirely meaningless noise.
Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics
#34My sister-in-law (girlfriends brothers girlfriend, not that it matters) recently studied for a data analytics certification. Actually several.
The entire course (located on here: https://medieinstitutet.se) is based on Google Analytics.
Now her entire value is tied to the use of Google Analytics, she will almost certainly fight very hard to ensure that these skills remain relevant, nobody would want to retrain for 6-12mo on new analytics systems (or, god forbid, not be an analyst at all!).
I think we don't really assess the amount of lock-in we allow when we learn something that supposedly makes our lives simpler. Google Analytics was sold as a solution to you making your own analytics, because that's hard! and the cost is that google gets your information too- which most webmasters don't care about individually.
However now we're in a situation where at least a few thousand people depend on this precise tool existing, and will be economically useless if it is banned.
Personally I find this astonishingly foolish of the people who train exclusively on these tools instead of first principles and primitives.
That said; we also have "Cloud Engineer" as a job title, so I'm not sure we will learn this lesson.
Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics
#35Analytics right now is basically "you won't get any useful information for your website because we value users' privacy, don't worry we see all of the data anyway" Remember, you aren't the customer if you embed Google Analytics, Google is. edit: if you want analytics, honestly just roll your own... you can't trust advertising companies with your users' data
"Roll your own" is hubris, unless you have the time, energy, inclination, theoretical knowledge, etc; I wouldn't try and solve solved problems if you can help it. But, host your own is definitely recommended IMO; a lot of the GDPR issues are resolved if you just host your own, because no data is shared to a 3rd party. Then you only need to worry about getting some approval and data retention. I'm sure data retention…
> unless you have the time, energy, inclination, theoretical knowledge
Why does anyone need all that?
Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics
#36Analytics right now is basically "you won't get any useful information for your website because we value users' privacy, don't worry we see all of the data anyway" Remember, you aren't the customer if you embed Google Analytics, Google is. edit: if you want analytics, honestly just roll your own... you can't trust advertising companies with your users' data
Matomo is a good self hosted analytics option.
As is snowplow https://github.com/snowplow/snowplow-javascript-tracker
Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics
#37I wonder if this also will apply to Google's ad related spyware? Going after just Analytics seems like quite a small step.
This authority does not go after anybody. They got a complaint by NOYB regarding these specific companies and therefore was forced to investigate specifically them.
Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics
#38For those who look for an alternative https://plausible.io is a great replacement.
Great for plausible.io of course. But what is the difference for the end user?
- GDPR: hosted in EU vs US, so your data is traveling less far. The things the plausible can do with the data is more or less the same.
- No cookies: don't see the point of that tbh, they will probably perform even more invasive tricks like finger printing to replace the cookie requirement
Bottom line, the website visitors data is still logged, stored and tracked - only now with a different actor.
Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics
#39Unrelated: I used ChatGPT to generate remark.js presentation HTML code from some content. It did generate the code, but it inserted a GA snippet along with a random GA account code at the bottom of the code. I did not even catch it immediately (laziness, totally my fault), but noticed it a couple of days later when I was modifying the presentation.
> totally my fault
IMHO, it's not totally your fault; private information shouldn't be shared with others. It's your responsibility to verify what ChatGPT is writing before you use it; it's OpenAI's responsibility to not share private information.
Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or if you're after free analytics, Cloudflare has something. Should be GDPR compliant since they don't use cookies or local storage.
GDPR is not about cookies or local storage. It's about knowing users' personal data and doing things with it.
The only personal data that you can get from HTTP requests without doing tracking or fingerprinting is the IP address, which Cloudflare also isn't using.