I appreciate the problem and I would like to stop using GA in my static pages as well, but trading one privately-owned software from a tech giant for another privately-owned software from a different tech giant seems a bit ludicrous. I would readily swap GA for some decent open-source solution though.
Thus far, AWS has proven to be safe for companies to host their data upon, and there have been no leaks of data stored in AWS into Amazon's marketing program. The HIPPA, PCI, and FedRamp certifications help back up their claims that a company's AWS data stays in AWS.
So in the end, paying for stuff just shows that you're a more valuable product to sell. And gives them a great primary key to track you by.
The approach of 'today, company X is known to make money via Y, so we can trust them with private data' only works until that data becomes valuable enough for the company to invest in extracting.
The web SDK also supports collection of client-side JavaScript errors, which is neat for tracking down bugs and things which might harm user experience.
Why don't you? Do you really need this tracking at all?
Id be interested to see how amazons et up would handle the set up I am backup analytics nerd for.
Major beverage brand hundreds of websites, multiple locales per site (a dozen or more for the big brands) on and has to handle roll up as well as well as custom metrics and dimensions.
I've tried to separate myself from Google in various ways, and one of those was to replace Google Analytics with open source software. I tried several; they're all either non-functional out of the box, or require significant time investment to even start approaching Google Analytics.
After losing about a month of stats (which matters when you're also running AdSense), I ended up going back to Google. It took the same amount of time to set up as when I initially set it up: around 2 minutes of adding the tracking code and uploading it.
[1]: https://matomo.org/docs/installation "Installing Matomo On-Premise"
[2]: https://matomo.org/pricing/ "Matomo Pricing"
Here's the link: https://sdan.io/pingpong. If you want to signup/give feed back, I would greatly appreciate if you do so:https://forms.gle/MhojBWWfdiWjZatC7 !
https://storage.googleapis.com/pingponganalytics/pingone.js
So... I should install a script that loads from Google servers?
Apart from that, you probably don't want to tie yourself to google like that. Once the users have this in their pages they will _never_ update it. You should use your own domain.
It's almost as if you need to be a software engineer and do actual software engineering, to responsibly use tools like analytics.
> I ended up going back to Google. It took the same amount of time to set up as when I initially set it up: around 2 minutes of adding the tracking code and uploading it.
So how much effort is the privacy of your visitors worth, then?
It sounds like deep down you know the right thing to do, which is a lot of work, but seeing everybody (in your bubble of technical peers) just as easily use Google Analytics, makes you feel like you're owed the difference to these profits.
Maybe there shouldn't be a 2-minute turnkey solution to analytics, because even if it's self-hosted, your next excuse is going to be that it requires a significant time effort to keep it secure and act responsibly with the data.
I think that for a lot of the "alternative" analytics tools, feature parity with Google Analytics isn't necessarily a goal, so this may explain your disappointment. I think the only exception here is Matomo, which is the only "advanced" OSS analytics as far as I know.
FTFY
I'm aware of this. The next logical step is to find a better ad network.
There is basically no strong indication right now of any large segment of users boycotting sites because the users care about privacy. There's the same small amount that have always been present and the number doesn't appear to be growing.
There are much better options out there. Quite apart from the solutions listed in these comments, a better option is to reconsider whether you really need analytics at all. Maybe the answer is yes if you are a business trying to understand your customers. But not every blog and project page needs analytics.
> ex-Amazon contractor, front-end lover, accessibility nerd, down for building cool shit, especially Vue.js and Amplify.js consulting
My alarm bells ring when the answer to "stop using X" is to "start using Y" where Y == company I worked for.
This isn't to say GA is or isn't problematic, but the article's bias is problematic.
fathom - Looks great. I am OK with closed source products (my motivation is self-hosting/privacy) but the direction is not clear to me. Maybe they will have a blog about it at some point - https://github.com/usefathom/fathom/issues/268. Having multiple code bases is going to be super hard.
goaccess.io - this analyses web logs
google-analytics-proxy - project is dead
matomo - this is what i use now and it works great. has a lot of quirks but if you spend some time, you can make it work.
ackee, goatcounter - simple but looks like this does not track users/sessions. it's mostly for page hits.
countly - looks good if you are enterprise. there is no pricing :(
freshlytics (from another thread) - page says it's in beta and not production ready
- Goatcounter also came up a few days ago on HN and got a lot of traction/discussion[1]
I can't find the comment it was posted in, but a HN user did a good comparison of a few privacy-focused analytics tools[2]
[0] https://simpleanalytics.com/
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22044854
[2] https://dev.to/hmhrex/a-comparison-of-the-top-3-privacy-focu...
Edit: I found the OG comment for the blog post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21716544
Doing log-analysis has its own drawbacks: not everyone has access to them, bot traffic will be a lot higher, and certain information is hard to access (like screen size). You can't always "just" use it.
(Netlify does sell access to log data but it looks expensive for most hobby / personal sites)
With our open-source data collection framework like RudderStack (an alternative to Segment), dumping data into a warehouse (Redshift/BigQuery/Druid etc) and sticking another open-source visualization layer on top (e.g. like SuperSet), it is possible to put together an alternative to Google Analytics. One of our early users did it and we wrote a blog about it
Shows me a fun 'You are not connected to the internet' page that lets you doodle on the page.
I got to it by adding the following filter
@@||dev.to/goatandsheep/stop-donating-your-customers-data-to-google-analytics-191?i=i$xhr,1pMore to the point: there is probably going to be a bias in the analytics. Different people have different reasons for protecting themselves against tracking, but it is highly unlikely that people who are unaware of or disinterested in the issue will use a blocker.
Terrible argument.
Am I missing something?
We use Splunk as our data engine and you can install it on your own server. This way you have full control, access and ownership of your data without letting third parties get any data. In that sense Harvest is basically the infrastructure that allows you to collect, store, use and visualize your data.
Besides that, we have been focusing on features that will help companies comply with privacy regulations. It is proven that this is not always easy in the complex world of online data.
For more information check https://harvest.graindata.com/en.
The original GA does not give Google useful cross-site user data because it uses only first-party cookies and anonymizes data as it collected it. To my knowledge you can still implement GA this way If you want to. Such an implementation would be GDPR compliant in not tracking any personal data, although your counsel might still say you need to list them as “analytics” cookies in a cookie banner (mine did).
No, they don't anonymize the collected data (for any reasonable definition of "anonymous". The IP address alone gives GA a very close approximation of a unique key, and their own documentation[1] explains the "anonymization" process:
"... the last octet of the user IP address
is set to zero ..."
The 8 least significant hits of an IPv4 address are the least interesting. The remaining 24 bits gives GA the ASN and is a lot of entropy for fingerprinting. It would be trivial to recover a unique key from the "anonymized" address by combining it with other analytics data, other cookies, timestamps.
[1] https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/2763052?hl=en
You can either disable cookies to run GA in cookieless mode [1], which presumably will affect how GA performs, since they can't determine repeat visits (but this might be fine, depending on the type of site you have), or you need to gain active consent to enable analytics cookies [2], which isn't much good if you want metrics for all users, not just those that opt-ed in.
If someone has solved this reasonably, I'd love to hear how! For now it seems like cookieless is my only option.
[1] https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection... [2] https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-pecr/cookies-a...
Your council should also have advised you that you need active consent in your cookie banner, since GDPR raised the standard for consent, which is the stumbling block I'm facing. [1]
[1] See "In brief": https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-pecr/cookies-a...
However GA data showed its usefullness when selling the business. The data was considered as a trusted source of information for the buyer. And all the definitions (unique user, etc) were aligned with the buyer's, so it was easier for them to assess the metrics.
See https://hackernoon.com/serverless-and-lambdaless-scalable-cr... And https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/using-amazon-api-gatewa...
Except for each of the 3 components you listed that make up your system. They are 3rd party dependencies,
I think OP was clearly referring to a self-managed solution as opposed to a set of 3rd party services like GA, Segment, etc, where the flow of data is out for your control.
Are you relying only on data you can get from your app? There is no reason not to build your own solution.
Are you relying on data you can't get from your app/website? Then you can only use GA, since FB does not have a service like this.
Very few businesses/people would choose to pay for something when GA is free. Why do that? To tell your customers "we value your privacy"?
It’s one of Apple’s strongest marketing pillars.
Still building it, but you can sign up for when it launches here: https://forms.gle/MhojBWWfdiWjZatC7 (I know it's ironically on google forms and I'll move away soon)
How do you intend to make money from this free service?
At the end of the day, if anything goes wrong, I'll always be happy to open source the whole thing.
I think that's the heart of why I so despise the GDPR. In an intent to change site behavior, politicians passed a law putting a burden on sites that did an undesirable thing (rather than, say, making the undesirable thing itself illegal).
Perhaps they thought sites would avoid the burden.
Did they not anticipate full shifting of burden onto end-users? Because being able to know how a site is used is extremely valuable to the site's owners.
I switched back to AWStats for my personal stuff. It's probably too basic for business or company apps, but for your personal stuff without javascript/cookies, it's still a great analytics tool.