Companies must stop using Google Analytics • Hacker News Board

Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#81

Post by Pannoniae » Tue, Jul 04, 2023, 10:37 AM UTC

victorNicollet wrote: post #61

Pannoniae wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm much more productive since I realised I don't have to use "standard" tools. It saves me so much time. With that being said, I don't make everything myself, but just the thought that I'm not obliged to use the best-practice standard solution to the problem is liberating to me and it makes me so much more productive in actually doing stuff.

Besides, even if you use the standard tool today, five years from now this will be "the tool that was standard five years ago" unless you actively migrate every so often. There are a few domains where the standard tools remain the same for a long while (Google Analytics being one), but often the standard tooling shifts more frequently than that.

Yeah, I heavily suspect the changes in "standard" stuff isn't due to there being revolutionary improvements every 4 years or so, it's just because the new stuff becomes trendy.

When I research about programming languages I'm always amazed how almost every feature existed in the 70s as well, just no one bothered to use it.

Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#82

Post by oneeyedpigeon » Tue, Jul 04, 2023, 10:37 AM UTC

Pannoniae wrote: post #79

pSYoniK wrote: post #59

What I am curios about is how much people actually use ALL the analytics information provided by a lot of these tools. I know Matomo and other such open source/self-hostable solutions, but how much info do you really use? I think for most use cases users would want to know if their content is consumed/read. Maybe how long someone spends on it and where they came from. For this sort of stuff you can write a small scri…

Or even if you don't want to use your web server's logs for this purpose for whatever reason, this is quite trivial to implement in JS yourself. No need for GA and other bloated analytics frameworks.

Well, you still need some kind of backend to store the data. You can send it to a 3rd party, but then you'll run into all the same GDPR issues.

Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#83

Post by fendy3002 » Tue, Jul 04, 2023, 10:37 AM UTC

znpy wrote: post #64

dijit wrote: 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…

what you wrote is mostly true but also partially incorrect: many competencies are transferrable. there are privacy-compliant products in that sense, unless you've been literally told "click here and click there" you should be able to employ old concepts with new tools.

You'll be surprised at how many competent (or looked like) people that cannot connect the dots between technologies / tools. They excel at one tools and will having a very hard time migrating to new one since they cannot connect the concept and similarity between both.

Not all, but there's many.

Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#84

Post by smcin » Tue, Jul 04, 2023, 10:39 AM UTC

dijit wrote: 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…

That's just as true as it used to be with proprietary statistics tools such as SPSS, Minitab, SAS, STATA, JMP, etc. They used to own the market, pre-cloud; and all the university courses and commercial trainings. Eventually, people migrated off those platforms in favor of the current cloud-vendor ones (or else migrated to code in R or Python, or even MATLAB).

> 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.

Not really, there is no GoogleAnalytics-industrial complex yet, but yes apparently they have quite a lot of lock-in on nonprofits. I see this story as a privacy regulatory story driven by the EU and GDPR. They will order GoogleAnalytics to fix violations, and then Google roll another version of GA. Customers who want to take a stronger stance on privacy would migrate off GA.

I doubt there is anyone whose entire livelihood depends on GoogleAnalytics (I don't think your relative's "entire value" does, for example) and even if there was, they could reskill in the medium-term, but anyway you could make the same comments about certification, lock-in and perverse incentives about AWS, or plenty of other companies in previous decades.

Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#85

Post by aerhardt » Tue, Jul 04, 2023, 10:40 AM UTC

j-a-a-p wrote: post #38

deofoo wrote: post #10

For 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 lo…

It’s like two dudes developing the solution and more importantly, charging you for it. If you don’t see the radical difference in incentive structures, then I don’t know what to tell you.

Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#86

Post by flagged24 » Tue, Jul 04, 2023, 10:41 AM UTC

pSYoniK wrote: post #59

What I am curios about is how much people actually use ALL the analytics information provided by a lot of these tools. I know Matomo and other such open source/self-hostable solutions, but how much info do you really use? I think for most use cases users would want to know if their content is consumed/read. Maybe how long someone spends on it and where they came from. For this sort of stuff you can write a small scri…

I decided to not convert to Google Analytics 4 because I used it as a glorified visitor count. I opted for a websocket to measure active users, the page they are on and some basic hourly peak and total user count split out over logged in and anonymous visits.

Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#87

Post by quickthrower2 » Tue, Jul 04, 2023, 10:43 AM UTC

Pannoniae wrote: post #63

vntok wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because setting up useful analytics for almost any definition of "useful" is not a trivial "I could do this in a WE" project.

The better question is.... what analytics do you actually need? I don't think cross-page tracking of the user is something most websites need ... Useful information is more like, what users clicked, what platform did they use, how much time they spent on the website and things like that. Those aren't that hard to just track yourself.

I reckon server render based analytics (as opposed to cookies and pixels etc. on 3rd party domains) will be better because it wont be blocked by ad blockers. If the page got rendered and sent, well I know about it unless you blocked the site entirely.

Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#88

Post by closewith » Tue, Jul 04, 2023, 10:44 AM UTC

supriyo-biswas wrote: post #67

foepys wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't want my data in the hands of the NSA as much as you don't want yours in the hands of the BND, FSB, or the People's Liberation Army.

Fair enough, but this were actually the reason, simply adding a statement such as “if a non-EU member state wants to request data about an EU national and said data cannot be released to the law enforcement of the non-EU member without a MLAT being served to the EU national’s government” would have been enough. However, I don’t see that, and many Europeans do give “dominance of Americans” as the reason, so I simply g…

Are you aware of the history of this case and the CLOUD Act?

The CLOUD Act requires US based companies to comply with US requests for data even when that data is stored exclusively outside the US. It's in direct conflict with the GDPR.

Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#89

Post by ori_prior » Tue, Jul 04, 2023, 10:45 AM UTC

dijit wrote: 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…

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 certain tools and products. Your average car repair guy will often be forced to specialize in one brand of car. Your home appliance guy will preferrably sell and repair one brand of washing machine, dryer, dishwasher.

Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#90

Post by capybara_2020 » Tue, Jul 04, 2023, 10:46 AM UTC

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #19

Pannoniae wrote: post #3

Analytics 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…

I would love to know other peoples opinion on this.

But I am coming around to the idea that self hosted(atleast partially) might be cheaper and better if you are a single dev/a small team.

The learning curve on the tools/hosting providers out there is has become very steep. Plus the costs are unclear with a lot of cloud providers and monthly subscription charges across the services you need can quickly stack up or the prices can suddenly change.

I tried deploying an app to AWS a few months back. You get a year's worth of credit when you start out. But the database I used was not covered(I did not realize all the database options were not covered). I got charged a pretty penny(Luckily it was not life shattering, but it was a shock. I hate to imagine what would have happened if I did this for a bigger app)

Tried Google Analytics a few times over the last few years. But again it has become complex, so I would had to spend a ton of time learning it to even just get started.

Had a few SAAS providers suddenly hike up prices or change pricing models or just shut down.

We have been using dedicated servers of late. A single server seems to be able to handle multiple client apps along with hobby/test apps for a fixed price. Yes it is not as easy as putting in an email and credit card and using a service. But the price and peace of mind has been worth it. Plus we just write a few scripts to automate things. In case the work load becomes too much we can hire a person to do that and 1 person will do. Compared to having to hire a specialist for each major cloud service we use.