11 ms·

Stop donating your customers' data to Google Analytics

433 points by bakztfuture 7y ago

lbrito 7y ago
So the solution is to use Amazon's tracker? 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.
- akie 7y ago
  I'm only aware of https://matomo.org/ https://matomo.org/ (formerly Piwik) as a good open source alternative to Google Analytics. Are there others?
  - jka 7y ago
    I can vouch for Countly ( https://github.com/countly https://github.com/countly ) which is open source, supports a few different platforms (web, iOS, Android), and has a nice administrative web interface. 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.
  - eldridgea 7y ago
    I'm a fan of Fathom[0]. The amount of data and insight is light compared to GA and others but if it meets your needs it's pretty great. [0] https://github.com/usefathom/fathom https://github.com/usefathom/fathom
    - gramakri 7y ago
      Do you know if fathom will remain opensource and/or self-hostable ? (https://github.com/usefathom/fathom/issues/268 https://github.com/usefathom/fathom/issues/268)
      - eitland 7y ago
        Nice answer from developer!: > We are keeping this version open-source, forever, and committing to maintain it. We also have a business to run, and while we love open-source, it isn't paying our bills (and Fathom takes a lot of work from 2 people to keep going) and we're not a charity. > If this repo was full of contributions and other folks pitching in, this would be a different story, but it's not—which is totally fine and accepted. But, since we want to keep going with Fathom, we have to separate V1 and V2 so we can make it sustainable. Otherwise we'd have to abandon it (which serves no one). > If you truly want your complaint heard, maybe contribute to what you're complaining about (financially, time, effort, etc). My wife always tells me that I'm not allowed to gripe unless I'm also taking action.
        Diesel555 7y ago
        Kind of a nice answer. Their comment about contributing is not really valid, I'm not going to contribute to something they have already solved and not released to open source. They already have the answer. And I understand the fact that open source is incredibly difficult to make money and maintaining it sucks. But just stop being open source and be another analytic company. Trying to pretend you are both and want contributions to things you've already written in your private repo doesn't work.
        eitland 7y ago
        I think we read it differently. In my view this is as about as nice as one can be: > We are keeping this version open-source, forever, ... Here they are committing to keeping their existing Open Source around instead of taking their toys and go home. > If this repo was full of contributions and other folks pitching in, this would be a different story, but it's not—which is totally fine and accepted. I think they aren't asking for contributions to v2 but rather for contributions to v1 which they are committed to keeping Open Source. But even then they acknowledge that users are free to use it without contributing in any way.
      - dvko 7y ago
        The open-source (self-hosted) version of Fathom is dead. The only commits they have been pushing to it in the last 12 months have been upsells for their closed-source & centralized paid offering.
- clarry 7y ago
  > I would like to stop using GA in my static pages Why don't you? Do you really need this tracking at all?
  - exotree 7y ago
    Depends on the job, purpose of site, and goals being accomplished. Hard to demonstrate value and improve digital business outcomes without GA (and other tools like HEAP Analytics).
    - tomrod 7y ago
      Yeah, the "value" being shown rarely actually investigates causal impact. Else they'd recognize that the literature shows that digital advertising has no measurable (provable) impact.[0] I recognize that there is more to digital business than adds, such as paternalistic commercial guidance, dark patterns, web traversal, and so on. However, I haven't seen proof that these patterns matter, especially given recent critiques on A/B testing (relative to multi-armed bandit). [0] https://www.gwern.net/docs/traffic/2015-lewis.pdf https://www.gwern.net/docs/traffic/2015-lewis.pdf
      - CrazyStat 7y ago
        > Else they'd recognize that the literature shows that digital advertising has no measurable (provable) impact.[0] This is a gross mischaracterization of what the linked paper says. "It's extremely difficult to measure the impact" (the claim that the cited paper puts forward) has quite a different meaning from "no measurable impact." The paper is entirely about the difficulty of measuring the impact, and studiously avoids, as far as I can tell, any inference about what the impact actually was in these experiments. For example, Table I gives the mean of the control group sales and a standard deviation, but no mean of the treatment group sales, which you would need to do a statistical test of whether there was an impact; similarly, Table II reports standard deviations of the sales effect and ROI, but not means; Table III presents power calculations based on hypothetical ROIs and the real measured standard deviations, but gives no clue to the real ROIs were. Nowhere does the paper support your claim that there is no measurable impact. In addition, the situation is very different for small companies that most people have never heard of. The article is citing studies done with major corporations with millions of customers and that are already well established in the collective consciousness. Measuring the effect of an advertising campaign taking you from 3.23 million customers to 3.231 million customers is indeed very difficult, particularly when you might fluctuate by tens of thousands of customers on a weekly basis. Measuring the effect of an AdWords campaign taking you from 200 customers to 250 customers is much easier.
- lgrebe 7y ago
  Check out https://simpleanalytics.com/ https://simpleanalytics.com/
- C1sc0cat 7y ago
  And the freebie GA doesn't limit you to a 25% sample across the board basically the bigger the date range and amount of sessions the more sampling you get. 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.
- falcolas 7y ago
  I'd say the following to this (very reasonable) argument against using AWS: AWS makes money by selling services, not collecting data. Should Amazon make the leap and start harvesting data from AWS for marketing purposes, the data from their analytics platform will be the least of our worries. 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.
  - thrav 7y ago
    This is why I use Prime photos, instead of Google photos. I need one, so I’ll take the paid one.
    - mceachen 7y ago
      I wouldn't conflate their general motives nor their data handling policies between their b2b offerings and their b2c offerings.
    - choward 7y ago
      The idea that just because you're paying for something it means they're not sharing your data or won't sell your data in the future send a but naive. If you don't control the server you have no idea what they are doing. You're just hoping they don't sell your data.
  - adreamingsoul 7y ago
    Or is that wishful thinking? AWS and Amazon are in the buisness of collecting, storing, and processing data.
    - falcolas 7y ago
      Can you provide a citation about that with AWS and its customers? Amazon itself, I have no problem believing (and have seen it in action. However, AWS is run separately from Amazon('s storefront, specifically). If AWS were really aggregating customer's data stored in AWS' platform, I think we'd be seeing a lot more about it in the news. And there would be a lot more than just Walmart advocating against its use.
- lern_too_spel 7y ago
  In this case, AWS is contractually obliged not to use your data. My criticism of the article is that the author mentions that users are blocking access to third party trackers, but that means AWS Pinpoint set up in the way he suggests will get blocked as well. People who have that concern have to expose Pinpoint endpoints on their own domains or implement some other first party tracking solution.
tmikaeld 7y ago
The problem is usually competing with "free" and Google knows this, there are privacy respecting alternatives like https://www.visitor-analytics.io https://www.visitor-analytics.io though.
coldcode 7y ago
It would be handy if people listed here all the alternatives that don't steal your customer info.
- lgrebe 7y ago
  https://simpleanalytics.com/ https://simpleanalytics.com/
- rapnie 7y ago
  https://usefathom.com/ https://usefathom.com/ https://goaccess.io/ https://goaccess.io/ https://github.com/NYPL/google-analytics-proxy https://github.com/NYPL/google-analytics-proxy http://matomo.org/ http://matomo.org/ https://ackee.electerious.com/ https://ackee.electerious.com/ https://www.goatcounter.com/ https://www.goatcounter.com/ https://count.ly/ https://count.ly/
  - gramakri 7y ago
    I gave many of these a visit. 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 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
    - Carpetsmoker 7y ago
      GoatCounter author here: doing some form of session tracking is on the roadmap; check back in a few months. The project is still quite new, with the first "real" release only being last week :-) As for Fathom, I find that last "since that people are confused"-comment rather funny, since their messaging on this has been confused for almost a year, haha
dempedempe 7y ago
This seems like more of a promotion for AWS Pinpoint than a criticism of GA.
AndrewStephens 7y ago
The headline is wrong, it should be changed to "Stop donating your customers' data to Google Analytics ... donate to another large corporation instead!" 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.
- runninganyways 7y ago
  Or you could write the 10 lines of JavaScript that'll do what 99% of people use Google analytics for
  - bibobap 7y ago
    Feel free to post those lines
    - quickthrower2 7y ago
      I reckon you'd need more than 9 "\n" characters to get it done. But in seriousness the 10 lines would be just use local storage or wotnot to store a tag, then call tracker.com?tag=... on each page load. "Rest is done on the server (TM)"
  - mateus1 7y ago
    If you think you can replicate that with 10 lines you have no idea what Google Analytics is used for.
    - freehunter 7y ago
      Those 10 lines probably depend on an npm package that relies on 100 other npm packages.
    - anderspitman 7y ago
      I'm ashamed to admit that I use GA on my blog to essentially count page views. The other information is interesting but mostly unused (by me). I would be far better served by a tool or service handling server logs (any recommendations?). But GA is 0 friction, so it's what I picked up back in the day. I suspect there are a lot of people in this boat.
snowwrestler 7y ago
The suggested Google Analytics implementation today is a collection of three separate Google technologies: the original GA, Doubleclick cookies to track demographics and interest, and Tag Manager to manage them. 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).
- nwellnhof 7y ago
  Yes, you can configure Google Analytics so that no data is shared with other Google services, at least no data about single visitors. I also came to the conclusion that using GA this way complies with the GDPR and I don't really understand what all the fuzz is about.
  - allover 7y ago
    As someone going through this right now, the main difficulty in being GDPR compliant with GA is the cookie problem. 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/analyticsjs/cookies-user-id#disabling_cookies https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection... [2] https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-pecr/cookies-and-similar-technologies/ https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-pecr/cookies-a...
- pdkl95 7y ago
  > anonymizes data as it collected it 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 ..." (if the logged event doesn't opt-in to this behavior by adding &aip=1 then GA presumably saves the entire IP. How many GA users bother setting that option?) 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 https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/2763052?hl=en
gpvos 7y ago
I didn't know about AWS Pinpoint before, but from what I can see, it only offers analytics for email and other messages, not for web pages, so presenting it as a full alternative for Google Analytics is misleading.
- unreal37 7y ago
  The author wrote a tool to make it do that I guess.
- rchaud 7y ago
  The article doesn't even seem to mention anything for which GA is nearly indispensable. E-commerce analytics, conversion funnel visualization, customer segmentation, etc.
gpvos 7y ago
http://archive.is/RAXU6 http://archive.is/RAXU6
aforty 7y ago
And firebase analytics is much the same as GA right? In fact I think it’s even viewed on the GA portal.
- nrjames 7y ago
  Connecting Firebase to Google Analytics is optional, for now.
StreamBright 7y ago
I have created a simple workflow using AWS Lambda + Kinesis + S3 to track our customers and not to have any 3rd party dependency. It took roughly 2 weeks but it is worth it since do not leak customer data and we have much tighter control over what we collect (no PII except the source ip that gets hashed in the process).
- ElFitz 7y ago
  FYI, if your setup relies on API Gateway, you probably could use VTL / Mapping Templates to directly send from API Gateway to Kinesis and skip the lambda altogether, like some do for dynamodb See https://hackernoon.com/serverless-and-lambdaless-scalable-crud-data-api-with-aws-api-gateway-and-dynamodb-626161008bb2 https://hackernoon.com/serverless-and-lambdaless-scalable-cr... And https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/using-amazon-api-gateway-as-a-proxy-for-dynamodb/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/using-amazon-api-gatewa...
  - StreamBright 7y ago
    Woo thanks! I did not know it. I might re-architect the workflow to have this.
- macinjosh 7y ago
  > I have created a simple workflow using AWS Lambda + Kinesis + S3 to track our customers and not to have any 3rd party dependency. Except for each of the 3 components you listed that make up your system. They are 3rd party dependencies,
  - whoisjuan 7y ago
    Everything is a 3rd party dependency then. The only way to not have a 3rd party dependency is to build your own infrastructure and use open source solutions (and even with OS you're still dependent). 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.
  - 7y ago
benbristow 7y ago
Interesting that the page breaks if you're using Adblock because of Google Analytics being in the URL. Shows me a fun 'You are not connected to the internet' page that lets you doodle on the page.
- marcosdumay 7y ago
  Not on Firefox with uBlock Origin.
  - benbristow 7y ago
    Using Edge (Chromium) with uBlock Origin
    - MadWombat 7y ago
      Same with FF 72.0.2 + uBlock Origin
  - davidarkemp2 7y ago
    I'd check your filters - EasyPrivacy has -google-analytics- blocked in the URL I got to it by adding the following filter @@||dev.to/goatandsheep/stop-donating-your-customers-data-to-google-analytics-191?i=i$xhr,1p
    - marcosdumay 7y ago
      EasyPrivacy was enabled. My Firefox was a minor update earlier than the one on the sibling comment (72.0.1). It has updated now, and the site claims that my connection is down on my machine too. Now that I have seen the message... It's a funny thing for a web page to claim.
unreal37 7y ago
"My competitors tracking solution is ridiculous. You should get your head examined if you use it. You should use mine instead." Terrible argument.
- modo_mario 7y ago
  You seems to have missed the arguments made tho. You get to avoid the cookies and as someone else pointed out Amazon doesn't use the data. It's your data.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
brainlessdev 7y ago
Related: the discussion about Goatcounter https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22044854 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22044854
zzzzer 7y ago
Done. Removed G ADS and G Analytics my website: personalrobots.biz
tzury 7y ago
Did not read through, but from a quick look, I suspect anyone can grab the code, and fill in your AWS with terabytes of garbage data which will end up in an enromous amount of dollars in AWS billing. Am I missing something?
- choward 7y ago
  Machine learning. How can you say no to machine learning? Did I mention machine learning?
pixelbath 7y ago
I see a lot of suggestions for free or open-source analytics packages, but I would refrain from recommending anything you haven't personally used. 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.
- jka 7y ago
  Please also bear in mind that any developer's personal time (whether your own or someone else's), while important and valuable - is also a trade-off against the aggregated time and value of your users' privacy.
  - shadowgovt 7y ago
    ... which, if users actually valued, they'd signal by ceasing to use one's site. 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.
    - drdeca 7y ago
      It seems to me like a person could care about “these n people lacking privacy in this way” more than n times as much as they would care about any one of them marginally gaining or losing privacy in that way? Or, idk if that is quite the right formulation for what I mean. But, at the least, it seems likely that some people will sometimes be willing to take an amount of effort to protect the privacy of a large number of people, when they wouldn’t take that same amount of effort to just protect their own to the same degree. It seems likely to me that a major impact of lack of privacy comes from many people lacking privacy, in ways that wouldn’t happen if it were only a few lacking it, and also where a few re-gaining it doesn’t influence the impact all that much. If so, then people not avoiding something because of privacy concerns in sufficient numbers to substantially influence the amount of use, doesn’t seem to entirely rule out that they care about privacy. Perhaps their behavior could be attributed to a collective action problem, where they each would prefer that all of them avoid it, but don’t find it worthwhile to be among only a small number of people avoiding it.
nicky0 7y ago
Anybody ever heard of server logs?
djsumdog 7y ago
I tried Matomo (Piwik) recently, but I only do log analysis and it doesn't really treat log access as a first class citizen. If you use Javascript tracking, it's probably the right way to go. 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.
projproj 7y ago
I have fun looking at these stats (sites with Google tracking vs. sites without) in a Firefox addon I made: https://bitbucket.org/tayler/google-spy/src/master/ https://bitbucket.org/tayler/google-spy/src/master/, https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/googley-eyes/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/googley-eyes/
sdan 7y ago
I'm currently building a free analytics service that's the fastest. Ever. Faster than Fathom, Simple Analaytics, pretty much everything except Google Analytics you can think of. https://sdan.io/pingpong https://sdan.io/pingpong Still building it, but you can sign up for when it launches here: https://forms.gle/MhojBWWfdiWjZatC7 https://forms.gle/MhojBWWfdiWjZatC7 (I know it's ironically on google forms and I'll move away soon) > https://sdan.io/pingpong https://sdan.io/pingpong
- october_sky 7y ago
  > I'm currently building a free analytics service that's the fastest. Ever. How do you intend to make money from this free service?
  - sdan 7y ago
    If you're getting over a million hits I might add some incentive to donate, but mainly I take this as my payback to the developer community. I'm launching another product in a different domain at the moment and hoping that can compensate. At the end of the day, if anything goes wrong, I'll always be happy to open source the whole thing.
II2II 7y ago
> Tracker blockers are increasing in popularity so consumers can protect themselves against this tracking, reducing the effectiveness of your analytics. More 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.
shadowgovt 7y ago
> And if you think that's okay, you should take your head out of the sand because consumers are demanding it. Please tell me how many of your users like the large cookie agreement popups that they have to dismiss...I-I mean read and accept just to consume your content. Agreements that you're forced to have them agree to because you're using cookie-based trackers like GA. 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.
drusepth 7y ago
Is there a free alternative that has feature parity with GA and isn't very difficult to set up?
ptasci67 7y ago
A bit tangential but a quick click on the author's name in the article and their bio reads: > 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.
jammygit 7y ago
I have used simpleanalytics for a while. It offers a lot less granular information because it deliberately collects less for privacy reasons
digitalengineer 7y ago
Why not spin your own? This tool comes with a lot of tools out of the box and can also run personalization techniques and more: https://harvest.graindata.com/en/store https://harvest.graindata.com/en/store
fretn 7y ago
a few weeks ago my blood needed a checkup. They sent me the results by mail. The results where on a non password protected but 'unguessable' url. And the page ofcourse contained google analytics, I'm in the EU, I wonder if this is legal
- prox 7y ago
  If they haven’t notified you, and hence you can’t/didn’t comply, it probably isn’t. Especially medical companies are scrutinized for following gdpr. You could make a case here to either the companies privacy officer, or your countries privacy watchdog. https://gdpr-info.eu/art-39-gdpr/ https://gdpr-info.eu/art-39-gdpr/
snambi 7y ago
Yeah right, stop using GA and start using Amazon analytics. Very good suggestion.
oarabbus_ 7y ago
The problem is GA is orders of magnitude better than the competition for price to performance ratio.
mariushn 7y ago
The main issue is that competition is basically cut out due to the free pricing of GA. 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"?
- leokennis 7y ago
  Don’t you think that, in today’s climate, customer knowledge and involvement about online tracking, fingerprinting, filter bubbles etc. is at an all time high? And that makes this the best time ever to indeed be proud to tell your customers that “we value your privacy”. It’s one of Apple’s strongest marketing pillars.
pbalau 7y ago
You really have 2 choices: 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.
f4rker 7y ago
Google grip on the WWW must be loosened some. This is not Googles Internet.
JosIJntema 7y ago
Interesting topic. This among others is one of the reasons we started building Harvest. Just as with Google Analytics, you can start tracking data with just a small snippet of Javascript. 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 https://harvest.graindata.com/en.
IdontRememberIt 7y ago
While running my first business GA was not really usefull (We used internal tools easier to integrate in the code and adapt to our needs). 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.

433 points by bakztfuture 7y ago

So the solution is to use Amazon's tracker? 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.

akie 7y ago
I'm only aware of https://matomo.org/ https://matomo.org/ (formerly Piwik) as a good open source alternative to Google Analytics. Are there others?
- jka 7y ago
  I can vouch for Countly ( https://github.com/countly https://github.com/countly ) which is open source, supports a few different platforms (web, iOS, Android), and has a nice administrative web interface. 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.
- eldridgea 7y ago
  I'm a fan of Fathom[0]. The amount of data and insight is light compared to GA and others but if it meets your needs it's pretty great. [0] https://github.com/usefathom/fathom https://github.com/usefathom/fathom
  - gramakri 7y ago
    Do you know if fathom will remain opensource and/or self-hostable ? (https://github.com/usefathom/fathom/issues/268 https://github.com/usefathom/fathom/issues/268)
    - eitland 7y ago
      Nice answer from developer!: > We are keeping this version open-source, forever, and committing to maintain it. We also have a business to run, and while we love open-source, it isn't paying our bills (and Fathom takes a lot of work from 2 people to keep going) and we're not a charity. > If this repo was full of contributions and other folks pitching in, this would be a different story, but it's not—which is totally fine and accepted. But, since we want to keep going with Fathom, we have to separate V1 and V2 so we can make it sustainable. Otherwise we'd have to abandon it (which serves no one). > If you truly want your complaint heard, maybe contribute to what you're complaining about (financially, time, effort, etc). My wife always tells me that I'm not allowed to gripe unless I'm also taking action.
      - Diesel555 7y ago
        Kind of a nice answer. Their comment about contributing is not really valid, I'm not going to contribute to something they have already solved and not released to open source. They already have the answer. And I understand the fact that open source is incredibly difficult to make money and maintaining it sucks. But just stop being open source and be another analytic company. Trying to pretend you are both and want contributions to things you've already written in your private repo doesn't work.
        eitland 7y ago
        I think we read it differently. In my view this is as about as nice as one can be: > We are keeping this version open-source, forever, ... Here they are committing to keeping their existing Open Source around instead of taking their toys and go home. > If this repo was full of contributions and other folks pitching in, this would be a different story, but it's not—which is totally fine and accepted. I think they aren't asking for contributions to v2 but rather for contributions to v1 which they are committed to keeping Open Source. But even then they acknowledge that users are free to use it without contributing in any way.
    - dvko 7y ago
      The open-source (self-hosted) version of Fathom is dead. The only commits they have been pushing to it in the last 12 months have been upsells for their closed-source & centralized paid offering.
clarry 7y ago
> I would like to stop using GA in my static pages Why don't you? Do you really need this tracking at all?
- exotree 7y ago
  Depends on the job, purpose of site, and goals being accomplished. Hard to demonstrate value and improve digital business outcomes without GA (and other tools like HEAP Analytics).
  - tomrod 7y ago
    Yeah, the "value" being shown rarely actually investigates causal impact. Else they'd recognize that the literature shows that digital advertising has no measurable (provable) impact.[0] I recognize that there is more to digital business than adds, such as paternalistic commercial guidance, dark patterns, web traversal, and so on. However, I haven't seen proof that these patterns matter, especially given recent critiques on A/B testing (relative to multi-armed bandit). [0] https://www.gwern.net/docs/traffic/2015-lewis.pdf https://www.gwern.net/docs/traffic/2015-lewis.pdf
    - CrazyStat 7y ago
      > Else they'd recognize that the literature shows that digital advertising has no measurable (provable) impact.[0] This is a gross mischaracterization of what the linked paper says. "It's extremely difficult to measure the impact" (the claim that the cited paper puts forward) has quite a different meaning from "no measurable impact." The paper is entirely about the difficulty of measuring the impact, and studiously avoids, as far as I can tell, any inference about what the impact actually was in these experiments. For example, Table I gives the mean of the control group sales and a standard deviation, but no mean of the treatment group sales, which you would need to do a statistical test of whether there was an impact; similarly, Table II reports standard deviations of the sales effect and ROI, but not means; Table III presents power calculations based on hypothetical ROIs and the real measured standard deviations, but gives no clue to the real ROIs were. Nowhere does the paper support your claim that there is no measurable impact. In addition, the situation is very different for small companies that most people have never heard of. The article is citing studies done with major corporations with millions of customers and that are already well established in the collective consciousness. Measuring the effect of an advertising campaign taking you from 3.23 million customers to 3.231 million customers is indeed very difficult, particularly when you might fluctuate by tens of thousands of customers on a weekly basis. Measuring the effect of an AdWords campaign taking you from 200 customers to 250 customers is much easier.
lgrebe 7y ago
Check out https://simpleanalytics.com/ https://simpleanalytics.com/
C1sc0cat 7y ago
And the freebie GA doesn't limit you to a 25% sample across the board basically the bigger the date range and amount of sessions the more sampling you get. 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.
falcolas 7y ago
I'd say the following to this (very reasonable) argument against using AWS: AWS makes money by selling services, not collecting data. Should Amazon make the leap and start harvesting data from AWS for marketing purposes, the data from their analytics platform will be the least of our worries. 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.
- thrav 7y ago
  This is why I use Prime photos, instead of Google photos. I need one, so I’ll take the paid one.
  - mceachen 7y ago
    I wouldn't conflate their general motives nor their data handling policies between their b2b offerings and their b2c offerings.
  - choward 7y ago
    The idea that just because you're paying for something it means they're not sharing your data or won't sell your data in the future send a but naive. If you don't control the server you have no idea what they are doing. You're just hoping they don't sell your data.
- adreamingsoul 7y ago
  Or is that wishful thinking? AWS and Amazon are in the buisness of collecting, storing, and processing data.
  - falcolas 7y ago
    Can you provide a citation about that with AWS and its customers? Amazon itself, I have no problem believing (and have seen it in action. However, AWS is run separately from Amazon('s storefront, specifically). If AWS were really aggregating customer's data stored in AWS' platform, I think we'd be seeing a lot more about it in the news. And there would be a lot more than just Walmart advocating against its use.
lern_too_spel 7y ago
In this case, AWS is contractually obliged not to use your data. My criticism of the article is that the author mentions that users are blocking access to third party trackers, but that means AWS Pinpoint set up in the way he suggests will get blocked as well. People who have that concern have to expose Pinpoint endpoints on their own domains or implement some other first party tracking solution.

tmikaeld 7y ago

The problem is usually competing with "free" and Google knows this, there are privacy respecting alternatives like https://www.visitor-analytics.io https://www.visitor-analytics.io though.

coldcode 7y ago

It would be handy if people listed here all the alternatives that don't steal your customer info.

lgrebe 7y ago
https://simpleanalytics.com/ https://simpleanalytics.com/
rapnie 7y ago
https://usefathom.com/ https://usefathom.com/ https://goaccess.io/ https://goaccess.io/ https://github.com/NYPL/google-analytics-proxy https://github.com/NYPL/google-analytics-proxy http://matomo.org/ http://matomo.org/ https://ackee.electerious.com/ https://ackee.electerious.com/ https://www.goatcounter.com/ https://www.goatcounter.com/ https://count.ly/ https://count.ly/
- gramakri 7y ago
  I gave many of these a visit. 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 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
  - Carpetsmoker 7y ago
    GoatCounter author here: doing some form of session tracking is on the roadmap; check back in a few months. The project is still quite new, with the first "real" release only being last week :-) As for Fathom, I find that last "since that people are confused"-comment rather funny, since their messaging on this has been confused for almost a year, haha

dempedempe 7y ago

This seems like more of a promotion for AWS Pinpoint than a criticism of GA.

AndrewStephens 7y ago

The headline is wrong, it should be changed to "Stop donating your customers' data to Google Analytics ... donate to another large corporation instead!" 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.

runninganyways 7y ago
Or you could write the 10 lines of JavaScript that'll do what 99% of people use Google analytics for
- bibobap 7y ago
  Feel free to post those lines
  - quickthrower2 7y ago
    I reckon you'd need more than 9 "\n" characters to get it done. But in seriousness the 10 lines would be just use local storage or wotnot to store a tag, then call tracker.com?tag=... on each page load. "Rest is done on the server (TM)"
- mateus1 7y ago
  If you think you can replicate that with 10 lines you have no idea what Google Analytics is used for.
  - freehunter 7y ago
    Those 10 lines probably depend on an npm package that relies on 100 other npm packages.
  - anderspitman 7y ago
    I'm ashamed to admit that I use GA on my blog to essentially count page views. The other information is interesting but mostly unused (by me). I would be far better served by a tool or service handling server logs (any recommendations?). But GA is 0 friction, so it's what I picked up back in the day. I suspect there are a lot of people in this boat.

snowwrestler 7y ago

The suggested Google Analytics implementation today is a collection of three separate Google technologies: the original GA, Doubleclick cookies to track demographics and interest, and Tag Manager to manage them. 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).

nwellnhof 7y ago
Yes, you can configure Google Analytics so that no data is shared with other Google services, at least no data about single visitors. I also came to the conclusion that using GA this way complies with the GDPR and I don't really understand what all the fuzz is about.
- allover 7y ago
  As someone going through this right now, the main difficulty in being GDPR compliant with GA is the cookie problem. 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/analyticsjs/cookies-user-id#disabling_cookies https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection... [2] https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-pecr/cookies-and-similar-technologies/ https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-pecr/cookies-a...
pdkl95 7y ago
> anonymizes data as it collected it 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 ..." (if the logged event doesn't opt-in to this behavior by adding &aip=1 then GA presumably saves the entire IP. How many GA users bother setting that option?) 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 https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/2763052?hl=en

gpvos 7y ago

I didn't know about AWS Pinpoint before, but from what I can see, it only offers analytics for email and other messages, not for web pages, so presenting it as a full alternative for Google Analytics is misleading.

unreal37 7y ago
The author wrote a tool to make it do that I guess.
rchaud 7y ago
The article doesn't even seem to mention anything for which GA is nearly indispensable. E-commerce analytics, conversion funnel visualization, customer segmentation, etc.

gpvos 7y ago

http://archive.is/RAXU6 http://archive.is/RAXU6

aforty 7y ago

And firebase analytics is much the same as GA right? In fact I think it’s even viewed on the GA portal.

nrjames 7y ago
Connecting Firebase to Google Analytics is optional, for now.

StreamBright 7y ago

I have created a simple workflow using AWS Lambda + Kinesis + S3 to track our customers and not to have any 3rd party dependency. It took roughly 2 weeks but it is worth it since do not leak customer data and we have much tighter control over what we collect (no PII except the source ip that gets hashed in the process).

ElFitz 7y ago
FYI, if your setup relies on API Gateway, you probably could use VTL / Mapping Templates to directly send from API Gateway to Kinesis and skip the lambda altogether, like some do for dynamodb See https://hackernoon.com/serverless-and-lambdaless-scalable-crud-data-api-with-aws-api-gateway-and-dynamodb-626161008bb2 https://hackernoon.com/serverless-and-lambdaless-scalable-cr... And https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/using-amazon-api-gateway-as-a-proxy-for-dynamodb/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/using-amazon-api-gatewa...
- StreamBright 7y ago
  Woo thanks! I did not know it. I might re-architect the workflow to have this.
macinjosh 7y ago
> I have created a simple workflow using AWS Lambda + Kinesis + S3 to track our customers and not to have any 3rd party dependency. Except for each of the 3 components you listed that make up your system. They are 3rd party dependencies,
- whoisjuan 7y ago
  Everything is a 3rd party dependency then. The only way to not have a 3rd party dependency is to build your own infrastructure and use open source solutions (and even with OS you're still dependent). 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.
- 7y ago

benbristow 7y ago

Interesting that the page breaks if you're using Adblock because of Google Analytics being in the URL. Shows me a fun 'You are not connected to the internet' page that lets you doodle on the page.

marcosdumay 7y ago
Not on Firefox with uBlock Origin.
- benbristow 7y ago
  Using Edge (Chromium) with uBlock Origin
  - MadWombat 7y ago
    Same with FF 72.0.2 + uBlock Origin
- davidarkemp2 7y ago
  I'd check your filters - EasyPrivacy has -google-analytics- blocked in the URL I got to it by adding the following filter @@||dev.to/goatandsheep/stop-donating-your-customers-data-to-google-analytics-191?i=i$xhr,1p
  - marcosdumay 7y ago
    EasyPrivacy was enabled. My Firefox was a minor update earlier than the one on the sibling comment (72.0.1). It has updated now, and the site claims that my connection is down on my machine too. Now that I have seen the message... It's a funny thing for a web page to claim.

unreal37 7y ago

"My competitors tracking solution is ridiculous. You should get your head examined if you use it. You should use mine instead." Terrible argument.

modo_mario 7y ago
You seems to have missed the arguments made tho. You get to avoid the cookies and as someone else pointed out Amazon doesn't use the data. It's your data.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

brainlessdev 7y ago

Related: the discussion about Goatcounter https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22044854 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22044854

zzzzer 7y ago

Done. Removed G ADS and G Analytics my website: personalrobots.biz

tzury 7y ago

Did not read through, but from a quick look, I suspect anyone can grab the code, and fill in your AWS with terabytes of garbage data which will end up in an enromous amount of dollars in AWS billing. Am I missing something?

choward 7y ago
Machine learning. How can you say no to machine learning? Did I mention machine learning?

pixelbath 7y ago

I see a lot of suggestions for free or open-source analytics packages, but I would refrain from recommending anything you haven't personally used. 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.

jka 7y ago
Please also bear in mind that any developer's personal time (whether your own or someone else's), while important and valuable - is also a trade-off against the aggregated time and value of your users' privacy.
- shadowgovt 7y ago
  ... which, if users actually valued, they'd signal by ceasing to use one's site. 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.
  - drdeca 7y ago
    It seems to me like a person could care about “these n people lacking privacy in this way” more than n times as much as they would care about any one of them marginally gaining or losing privacy in that way? Or, idk if that is quite the right formulation for what I mean. But, at the least, it seems likely that some people will sometimes be willing to take an amount of effort to protect the privacy of a large number of people, when they wouldn’t take that same amount of effort to just protect their own to the same degree. It seems likely to me that a major impact of lack of privacy comes from many people lacking privacy, in ways that wouldn’t happen if it were only a few lacking it, and also where a few re-gaining it doesn’t influence the impact all that much. If so, then people not avoiding something because of privacy concerns in sufficient numbers to substantially influence the amount of use, doesn’t seem to entirely rule out that they care about privacy. Perhaps their behavior could be attributed to a collective action problem, where they each would prefer that all of them avoid it, but don’t find it worthwhile to be among only a small number of people avoiding it.

nicky0 7y ago

Anybody ever heard of server logs?

djsumdog 7y ago

I tried Matomo (Piwik) recently, but I only do log analysis and it doesn't really treat log access as a first class citizen. If you use Javascript tracking, it's probably the right way to go. 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.

projproj 7y ago

I have fun looking at these stats (sites with Google tracking vs. sites without) in a Firefox addon I made: https://bitbucket.org/tayler/google-spy/src/master/ https://bitbucket.org/tayler/google-spy/src/master/, https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/googley-eyes/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/googley-eyes/

sdan 7y ago

I'm currently building a free analytics service that's the fastest. Ever. Faster than Fathom, Simple Analaytics, pretty much everything except Google Analytics you can think of. https://sdan.io/pingpong https://sdan.io/pingpong Still building it, but you can sign up for when it launches here: https://forms.gle/MhojBWWfdiWjZatC7 https://forms.gle/MhojBWWfdiWjZatC7 (I know it's ironically on google forms and I'll move away soon) > https://sdan.io/pingpong https://sdan.io/pingpong

october_sky 7y ago
> I'm currently building a free analytics service that's the fastest. Ever. How do you intend to make money from this free service?
- sdan 7y ago
  If you're getting over a million hits I might add some incentive to donate, but mainly I take this as my payback to the developer community. I'm launching another product in a different domain at the moment and hoping that can compensate. At the end of the day, if anything goes wrong, I'll always be happy to open source the whole thing.

II2II 7y ago

> Tracker blockers are increasing in popularity so consumers can protect themselves against this tracking, reducing the effectiveness of your analytics. More 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.

shadowgovt 7y ago

> And if you think that's okay, you should take your head out of the sand because consumers are demanding it. Please tell me how many of your users like the large cookie agreement popups that they have to dismiss...I-I mean read and accept just to consume your content. Agreements that you're forced to have them agree to because you're using cookie-based trackers like GA. 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.

drusepth 7y ago

Is there a free alternative that has feature parity with GA and isn't very difficult to set up?

ptasci67 7y ago

A bit tangential but a quick click on the author's name in the article and their bio reads: > 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.

jammygit 7y ago

I have used simpleanalytics for a while. It offers a lot less granular information because it deliberately collects less for privacy reasons

digitalengineer 7y ago

Why not spin your own? This tool comes with a lot of tools out of the box and can also run personalization techniques and more: https://harvest.graindata.com/en/store https://harvest.graindata.com/en/store

fretn 7y ago

a few weeks ago my blood needed a checkup. They sent me the results by mail. The results where on a non password protected but 'unguessable' url. And the page ofcourse contained google analytics, I'm in the EU, I wonder if this is legal

prox 7y ago
If they haven’t notified you, and hence you can’t/didn’t comply, it probably isn’t. Especially medical companies are scrutinized for following gdpr. You could make a case here to either the companies privacy officer, or your countries privacy watchdog. https://gdpr-info.eu/art-39-gdpr/ https://gdpr-info.eu/art-39-gdpr/

snambi 7y ago

Yeah right, stop using GA and start using Amazon analytics. Very good suggestion.

oarabbus_ 7y ago

The problem is GA is orders of magnitude better than the competition for price to performance ratio.

mariushn 7y ago

The main issue is that competition is basically cut out due to the free pricing of GA. 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"?

leokennis 7y ago
Don’t you think that, in today’s climate, customer knowledge and involvement about online tracking, fingerprinting, filter bubbles etc. is at an all time high? And that makes this the best time ever to indeed be proud to tell your customers that “we value your privacy”. It’s one of Apple’s strongest marketing pillars.

pbalau 7y ago

You really have 2 choices: 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.

f4rker 7y ago

Google grip on the WWW must be loosened some. This is not Googles Internet.

JosIJntema 7y ago

Interesting topic. This among others is one of the reasons we started building Harvest. Just as with Google Analytics, you can start tracking data with just a small snippet of Javascript. 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 https://harvest.graindata.com/en.

IdontRememberIt 7y ago

While running my first business GA was not really usefull (We used internal tools easier to integrate in the code and adapt to our needs). 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.