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Companies must stop using Google Analytics

imy.se

301–310 of 672 posts

Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#301
post #251
post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the lesson here?

Don't put all your eggs in one basket. We're taught that for everything from investing to dating.

This gets far more difficult as one competitor in an industry nears monopoly status.

Lets say for example that you somehow make $120,000 a year over expenses with instagram (don't ask how, it's just an example). This is far more than you previously made in your last job by double. The problem is it takes nearly 100% of your working time to make this income on that single platform. Any less amount of effort and your income drops significantly. Now, you are in a trap where you cannot split your efforts between platforms, you have to go full in on one.

Your solution would be to make far less money... um, safely? Whereas a far more realistic solution would be to ensure that you don't live to close to the edge of your means and put 1/3rd of your income back in savings in case the day the platform fails/kicks you occurs.

Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#302

Luckily for them, google has basically forced everyone to stop using analytics as of July this year (I don't consider ga4 to be a replacement).

It is deeply bizarre how much worse GA4 is as a product. I don't understand it.

It's much worse to comply with onerous EU regulations. They make it painstakingly useless.

Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This level of dependence on certain tools is neither rare nor unprecedented. Your run-of-the-mill business drone will be trained on Word/Excel/Outlook and be hard to impossible to retrain on anything else (either because of actual stupidity or resistance to change). This already starts at school where "Informatik" is often just learning where to click in Microsoft products. Similarly, tradespeople often specialize in…

'actual stupidity'... gotta love the general disdain of the 'run of the mill business drone'... It's funny my wife is a run of the mill business drone. She thinks IT is a bunch of assholes. I would say she is probably right. Way to keep things going.

and IT "assholes" think the run of the mill business drones are "assholes" as well. Their inability to be effective at their jobs tend to make IT lives worse because they can't understand what IT workers do but IT workers can understand what the basic run of the mill business drones do...and their work tends to be a bunch of pointless meetings.

Yeah, I work at a corporate office and have made it a mission to see what kind of work they do, and majority of the time...it's pointless meetings and meetings that involve pointing to IT workers and saying "do this". I check many of their daily schedules, and see what kind of stuff they talk about in meetings...just wow. Am I an "asshole"? Sure you can call me that, but I can call them useless in turn because I wonder how many more qualified people out there who can replace these workers.

Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#304
post #299

Just another thing that's going to leave the EU in the stone age, falling further and further behind the USA economically. 15 years ago, US and EU GDP per capita were about the same. Now the USA is 50% higher. Even West Virginia is richer per person than France.

[dead]

Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#305
post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can’t hash an ipv4 address. It’s trivial to brute force all possibilities given the limited problem space.

I have not researched it but I wonder if you can even hash IPv6 addresses. The issue I see is that allocations could be too regular so even if the full space is huge most addresses may occupy a small and predictable part of it.

Depends how you define IP in this sense. Each full individual IPv6, unlikely as most consumer devices are getting a somewhat random internal address on their network.

Now, with IPv6 for most consumers the first 64 bits is generally enough to define the edge network device that would be covered by a single IPv4 these days.

Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#306
post #299

Just another thing that's going to leave the EU in the stone age, falling further and further behind the USA economically. 15 years ago, US and EU GDP per capita were about the same. Now the USA is 50% higher. Even West Virginia is richer per person than France.

If that "stone age" means I'm less likely tracked and logged by a US megacorp to whom I never inteded to share information like what buying and what my medical problems are, GOOD.

I hope all Alphabet IP ranges get blackholed on the ISP level if they continue to perpetuate this hellscape we call targeted advertising.

Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'actual stupidity'... gotta love the general disdain of the 'run of the mill business drone'... It's funny my wife is a run of the mill business drone. She thinks IT is a bunch of assholes. I would say she is probably right. Way to keep things going.

and IT "assholes" think the run of the mill business drones are "assholes" as well. Their inability to be effective at their jobs tend to make IT lives worse because they can't understand what IT workers do but IT workers can understand what the basic run of the mill business drones do...and their work tends to be a bunch of pointless meetings. Yeah, I work at a corporate office and have made it a mission to see what…

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Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But there are infinite numbers of salts. Please explain how this could be brute-forced as long as the salt is used correctly? What am I missing?

No matter what strategy you use to hash IPs, if you can correlate to an IP you can find the original IP by just trying all options. It doesn’t matter what you do because 4B unique possibilities is just too low to prevent brute forcing while maintaining utility. If you use a random salt, then you need to store it or else the stored value has no utility. However you implement retrieval of that salt it can just be brute…

The salt could be stored as a cookie and you can follow the session but never be able to reverse the hash yourself. Any match you get in the brute-force attempt might as well be a collision.

The entropy can be in the salt, you're all making it sound way too easy. The requirement is "non-reversible". Given infinite time everything can be brute-forced, but this is the mossad/not-mossad problem.

It's good enough for storing passwords, where the salt is plain-text.

Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#309
post #195
post #34

My 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…

There's a saying: You'll never get rich harvesting in someone else's garden. It's not just Google Analytics, all Google products can be killed off at Google's whim any time, and it's not just google. That's why it's so important to work with tools you could own.

Or be ready to move to a new garden.

Off the grid Homesteaders aren't more profitable than people who engage in the compromise of society.

Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#310
post #34

My 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…

> we also have "Cloud Engineer" as a job title

Not quite the same, the core concepts and skills of a Cloud Engineer should be easily transfereable between providers and even to on-prem infra.

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