from Hacker News

Stop donating your customers' data to Google Analytics

by bakztfuture on 1/22/20, 10:53 AM with 156 comments

  • by lbrito on 1/22/20, 12:55 PM

    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.

  • by pixelbath on 1/22/20, 4:49 PM

    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.

  • by AndrewStephens on 1/22/20, 2:08 PM

    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.

  • by ptasci67 on 1/22/20, 6:50 PM

    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.

  • by coldcode on 1/22/20, 1:15 PM

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

  • by dempedempe on 1/22/20, 1:39 PM

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

  • by benbristow on 1/22/20, 2:50 PM

    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.

  • by tmikaeld on 1/22/20, 1:06 PM

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

  • by II2II on 1/22/20, 6:07 PM

    > 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.

  • by unreal37 on 1/22/20, 3:33 PM

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

    Terrible argument.

  • by tzury on 1/22/20, 4:38 PM

    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?

  • by JosIJntema on 1/23/20, 6:41 AM

    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.

  • by snowwrestler on 1/22/20, 2:14 PM

    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).

  • by gpvos on 1/22/20, 2:18 PM

    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.

  • by projproj on 1/22/20, 5:43 PM

    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://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/googley-eyes/

  • by IdontRememberIt on 1/24/20, 3:56 AM

    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.

  • by StreamBright on 1/22/20, 2:39 PM

    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).

  • by gpvos on 1/22/20, 2:21 PM

  • by digitalengineer on 1/22/20, 7:08 PM

    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

  • by fretn on 1/22/20, 7:10 PM

    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

  • by pbalau on 1/22/20, 9:12 PM

    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.

  • by mariushn on 1/22/20, 8:13 PM

    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"?

  • by brainlessdev on 1/22/20, 5:33 PM

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

  • by sdan on 1/22/20, 5:51 PM

    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

    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)

    > https://sdan.io/pingpong

  • by jammygit on 1/22/20, 7:05 PM

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

  • by oarabbus_ on 1/22/20, 7:52 PM

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

  • by drusepth on 1/22/20, 6:23 PM

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

  • by snambi on 1/22/20, 7:37 PM

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

  • by aforty on 1/22/20, 2:28 PM

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

  • by shadowgovt on 1/22/20, 6:08 PM

    > 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.

  • by djsumdog on 1/22/20, 5:38 PM

    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.

  • by nicky0 on 1/22/20, 5:37 PM

    Anybody ever heard of server logs?