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Self-host analytics for better privacy and accuracy

blog.filippo.io

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Re: Self-host analytics for better privacy and accuracy

#71

Post by tombrossman »

FiloSottile wrote: post #50
Ileca wrote: post #45

"Self-hosting analytics for better privacy and accuracy." Then why using google fonts which is listed by Disconnect.me (used by Firefox) as a tracking domain? Isn't that paradoxical?

Oh, hey, good point. Let me fix that. EDIT: Done. Not exactly straightforward to download Google Fonts but there are great helpers around. Got rid of CDNjs as well, since CloudFlare has HTTP/2 now. No 3rd parties left except GA, which will go in a day or two.

If you just want to have nicer webfonts without the 'phoning home to Google' issue try Brick webfonts at http://brick.im/.

If the goal is to get rid of all third-party dependencies you can still use the Brick repository on GitHub to download the better looking fonts and self-serve them, just as you are now with the Google served ones.

The only 'gotcha' I found with using Brick is that NoScript users won't see the fonts and won't see the Brick URL in the menu for whitelisting. They will need to inspect the page and learn that they must manually add brick.im. Not exactly user-friendly but then again NoScript breaks lots of things and users are used to it.

Re: Self-host analytics for better privacy and accuracy

#72

Post by lucb1e »

shermozle wrote: post #55
rhizome wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see. What is the upper bound of "big volume of data" possible under MySQL + Piwik?

That's a difficult thing to answer. However the more important problem is loss of data whenever your DB isn't available due to downtime, upgrade etc. It depends how important data loss is for your user case. I'm a data completist but I'm in therapy for it ;) It's definitely worth playing with, and trivially easy to spin up. Other self-hosted options aren't anything like as simple to get up and running.

I think if your database is down you've typically got bigger problems than your analytics.

Re: Self-host analytics for better privacy and accuracy

#73

Post by ngrilly »

lewisl9029 wrote: post #65
pixelmonkey wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Data ownership in GA is a "gray area" that becomes less gray if you pay $150K/yr for "GA Premium". Google has mixed incentives in running its free analytics service. It gets web-wide analytics data, it uses data to help it sell more AdWords to customers, and it integrates GA with other services, like their display advertising products (DFP, etc.) From a practical standpoint, you don't "own" analytics data when a) you…

While I find your stance on privacy very refreshing for an analytics company, hiding your pricing info behind a sales rep is a huge turnoff for me. If you feel your pricing is reasonable for the service that you provide, I really don't see why you can't just display it proudly on your site. If SpaceX can afford to not hide their pricing behind a sales rep, so can you: http://www.spacex.com/about/capabilities

Liked the comparison with SpaceX. Never heard this argument before :-)

Re: Self-host analytics for better privacy and accuracy

#74

Post by ngrilly »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #47
Ileca wrote: post #45

"Self-hosting analytics for better privacy and accuracy." Then why using google fonts which is listed by Disconnect.me (used by Firefox) as a tracking domain? Isn't that paradoxical?

I don't think* embedding Google Fonts allows Google much (any?) data collection beyond, presumably, that the font was requested, though it's definitely an unnecessary dependency. Given Google Fonts allows you to download all of the fonts, with license info provided, in a variety of formats, there's almost no good reason not to embed them directly in your own site. Right now, Sandstorm apps will currently work with Go…

I share the concern about privacy, but there is a benefit to using Google Fonts: maybe it increases the chance of the font being already cached on the client?

Re: Self-host analytics for better privacy and accuracy

#75

Post by dest »

philliphaydon wrote: post #63

Off topic a bit. But with GA being blocked, all these blocks work by blocking URLs and domains at the time they are loaded, but not requests made after load of the requested resource. Couldn't you just proxy the URL to GA so it's not blocked?

By "requests made after load of the requested resource", you mean JS XHR requests for example? I'd guess they are also filtered by adblockers, aren't they?

Re: Self-host analytics for better privacy and accuracy

#76

Post by weq »

lewisl9029 wrote: post #65
pixelmonkey wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Data ownership in GA is a "gray area" that becomes less gray if you pay $150K/yr for "GA Premium". Google has mixed incentives in running its free analytics service. It gets web-wide analytics data, it uses data to help it sell more AdWords to customers, and it integrates GA with other services, like their display advertising products (DFP, etc.) From a practical standpoint, you don't "own" analytics data when a) you…

While I find your stance on privacy very refreshing for an analytics company, hiding your pricing info behind a sales rep is a huge turnoff for me. If you feel your pricing is reasonable for the service that you provide, I really don't see why you can't just display it proudly on your site. If SpaceX can afford to not hide their pricing behind a sales rep, so can you: http://www.spacex.com/about/capabilities

Im sure parsle.ys analytics system told them that their potentical customers were getting sticker shock; hence the sales guys need to explain the value propesition to them properly before releaving the figure ;)

Sometimes i feel Google should just blanket replace their disclosure statements across the board with this classic video; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8fvTxv46ano. Less beating around the bush.

Re: Self-host analytics for better privacy and accuracy

#77

Post by aorth »

tirus wrote: post #9
FiloSottile wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The default Piwik Sandstorm install has "piwik" nowhere in the URL.

Yeah, unfortunately it shows up as https://ls4an735rucvfa6ps6bb.filippo.sandcats.io/embed.js - it's getting to the point where I need to start performing actual content inspection.

I run Piwik on my server log files. This is my right as a website owner / system admin. :)

Re: Self-host analytics for better privacy and accuracy

#78

Post by gedrap »

pixelmonkey wrote: post #42

Piwik is a great project, but it tends not to work well for handling sites with millions of events per day. Your MySQL table starts to bust at the seams pretty quickly. For big sites, you'll want that event data in GiB's of plain raw logs that you can bulk load into tools like BigQuery or Redshift for analysis. My team has built/delivered a SaaS web content analytics platform for the past few years called Parse.ly. W…

I've read parse.ly tech blog a few times, it was a great so I immediately recognized your company. As someone who's working in the publishing as well and gradually moving to a more data driven approach - thanks! :)

Re: Self-host analytics for better privacy and accuracy

#79

Post by moehm »

JohnBooty wrote: post #61
moehm wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can query your writes in Redis, so it won't be lost if your database goes down. https://piwik.org/faq/how-to/faq_19738/

Note to anybody reading this but not following the link: parent poster means "queue your writes in Redis" and not "query."

I'm sorry, I am not a native speaker and it was already late.

Re: Self-host analytics for better privacy and accuracy

#80

Post by pixelmonkey »

lewisl9029 wrote: post #65
pixelmonkey wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Data ownership in GA is a "gray area" that becomes less gray if you pay $150K/yr for "GA Premium". Google has mixed incentives in running its free analytics service. It gets web-wide analytics data, it uses data to help it sell more AdWords to customers, and it integrates GA with other services, like their display advertising products (DFP, etc.) From a practical standpoint, you don't "own" analytics data when a) you…

While I find your stance on privacy very refreshing for an analytics company, hiding your pricing info behind a sales rep is a huge turnoff for me. If you feel your pricing is reasonable for the service that you provide, I really don't see why you can't just display it proudly on your site. If SpaceX can afford to not hide their pricing behind a sales rep, so can you: http://www.spacex.com/about/capabilities

Whether to display pricing on the website is something we debated in the past, and continue to debate. (Your comment may wake up the debate for me.)

Pricing for analytics services (in the marketplace) is all over the map. Google picked $150K/year as the price for GA Premium because that's the low end of an Adobe Analytics contract, who is the market leader. We're typically cheaper than existing Adobe/GA contracts. Non-competitive "event analytics" companies like MixPanel and Heap have variable per-event pricing that would break the bank for the customers we serve. We have a bit of an aversion to per-event pricing because it feels like "punishing customers for success".

Meanwhile, per seat pricing, though attractive on the surface and popular in the SaaS segment, has several concerns in our space. First, we want customers to feel free to hand out access to our platform: part of our value proposition is democratizing access to analytics data. So we don't want "stingy seat quotas" typical with tools like Salesforce. Second, for an analytics tool, seats are a bit easier to "hack" for a pricing model -- though our dashboards can be customized per user, a single shared account can access all the data. Meanwhile, our costs don't scale with seats, but with site traffic/users instead.

For these reasons, and more, we've settled on "tiered pricing". Roughly speaking, our service is offered in three tiers. Each tier supports a larger class of site (more monthly uniques), which also bestows more features (e.g. more data retention in higher tiers). To work within the budget constraints of some companies, we will discount tiers while removing cost-affecting features, e.g. maybe you are in the highest class of site, but we disable API access and limit data retention. Because this is a tad more complex than a pricing page could express easily, and also because we think the value of the product comes through best in a guided demo, we made the decision to hide pricing and instead responsively provide demos on-demand.

So, the tl;dr is, pricing, and the display of it, is definitely something we think about, and we have (IMO valid) reasons for not displaying pricing right now, but you make a fair point: if Musk can price his rockets publicly, maybe we can figure something out, too :)

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