Is It Time To Ditch Google Analytics? (fastcompany.com) 96
"In the last year, a swell of privacy-focused website analytics platforms have started to provide an alternative to Google's tracking behemoth," reports Fast Company.
An anonymous reader shares their article about startups providing "privacy-centric analytics, claiming not to collect any personal data and only display simple metrics like page views, referral websites, and screen sizes in clean, pared-down interfaces."
While Simple Analytics and Fathom are both recent additions to the world of privacy-focused data analytics, 1.5% of the internet already uses an open-source, decentralized platform called Matomo, according to the company... "When [Google] released Google Analytics, [it] was obvious to me that a certain percent of the world would want the same technology, but decentralized, where it's not provided by a centralized corporation and you're not dependent on them," says Matthieu Aubry, Matomo's founder. "If you use it on your own server, it's impossible for us to get any data from it."
Aubry says that 99% of Matomo users use the analytics code, which is open for anyone to use, and host their analytics on their own servers -- which means that the company has no access to it whatsoever. For Aubry, that's his way of ensuring privacy by design. United Nations, Amnesty International, NASA, and the European Commission and about 1.5 million other websites use Matomo. But Matomo also offers significantly more robust tracking than Fathom or Simple Analytics -- Aubry says it can do about 95% of what Google Analytics does. Still, there are a few key differences. Like Simple Analytics, Matomo honors Do Not Track....
The rise of these analytics startups speaks to a growing desire for alternatives to the corporate ecosystems controlled by giants like Google, Amazon, and Apple, a swell that has helped privacy-focused search engine Duck Duck Go reach 36 million searches in a day. There's even an entire website dedicated to alternates to all of Google's services. For Aubry of Matomo, this concentration of power in the hands (or servers) of billion-dollar companies is the reason to support smaller, decentralized networks like his own that share code. "We want to control our future technology -- be able to understand it, study it, see what it does beneath the hood," he says. "And when it doesn't work we can fix it ourselves."
An anonymous reader shares their article about startups providing "privacy-centric analytics, claiming not to collect any personal data and only display simple metrics like page views, referral websites, and screen sizes in clean, pared-down interfaces."
While Simple Analytics and Fathom are both recent additions to the world of privacy-focused data analytics, 1.5% of the internet already uses an open-source, decentralized platform called Matomo, according to the company... "When [Google] released Google Analytics, [it] was obvious to me that a certain percent of the world would want the same technology, but decentralized, where it's not provided by a centralized corporation and you're not dependent on them," says Matthieu Aubry, Matomo's founder. "If you use it on your own server, it's impossible for us to get any data from it."
Aubry says that 99% of Matomo users use the analytics code, which is open for anyone to use, and host their analytics on their own servers -- which means that the company has no access to it whatsoever. For Aubry, that's his way of ensuring privacy by design. United Nations, Amnesty International, NASA, and the European Commission and about 1.5 million other websites use Matomo. But Matomo also offers significantly more robust tracking than Fathom or Simple Analytics -- Aubry says it can do about 95% of what Google Analytics does. Still, there are a few key differences. Like Simple Analytics, Matomo honors Do Not Track....
The rise of these analytics startups speaks to a growing desire for alternatives to the corporate ecosystems controlled by giants like Google, Amazon, and Apple, a swell that has helped privacy-focused search engine Duck Duck Go reach 36 million searches in a day. There's even an entire website dedicated to alternates to all of Google's services. For Aubry of Matomo, this concentration of power in the hands (or servers) of billion-dollar companies is the reason to support smaller, decentralized networks like his own that share code. "We want to control our future technology -- be able to understand it, study it, see what it does beneath the hood," he says. "And when it doesn't work we can fix it ourselves."
Re: Yes (Score:5, Interesting)
Just what's wrong with Webalizer [webalizer.org]?
That gives in principle all you really need to know about the traffic to your web site. Outsourcing the statistics to someone that runs cookies is more or less just a waste of time considering all the cookie filters and other filters from people that don't want to be tracked.
Re: (Score:3)
considering all the cookie filters and other filters from people that don't want to be tracked.
I think most people are just annoyed about having to click "confirm" on every single website.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Only complaint I've had about webalizer is when looking for "what were people searching for when they found my site?". Google uses obfuscated URLs now for search results, so I've no idea if visitors came from a search page for "glass hamburgers" or "basketball hedgehogs." If I used Google Analytics, I would have access to that information. I'm certain that change was intentional.
Re: (Score:2)
The value is analytics has to do with who is funding the website and its development to begin with. Speaking as a professional, I'm surprised no one has mentioned the ELK Stack [google.com] yet in this thread, so here I am. Look at all the pretty graphic dashboards Kibana can be configured to display [google.com]. It's free, and open-source, with paid support. And it works based purely off of log data, no javascript or magic-bits required, unlike everything else i can th
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
In fairness, Webalizer is pretty basic. When I last used it in anger, it still couldn't properly geo IP addresses and instead just used their reverse DNS to say all ".com" IPs were from the USA. That sort of thing is never going to get past any sort of 'SEO' or marketing function people.
However, GA can accept stats that you submit. I'm sure someone must have made a webalizer-style package that scrapes log files and send GA events. That way your marketing droids can still get whizzy graphs, but only from you
Re:Yes (Score:4, Interesting)
Around 2013 I came the same conclusion and removed GA from all of my websites. It's my opinion that there is no excuse for using cookies for any reason other than a single https-only one for the purpose of keeping people logged in. Server side IP address alone is accurate enough to gauge rough visitor behaviour patterns and the acquisition point (HTTP referrer) is the single only useful metric I personally pay attention to. Ergo, my "analytics" consists of a few lines of C# code which runs against a folder of daily nginx logs, filters out bots/referrer spam and produces a simple table of what's been going on. It's not rocket science.
One nagging question I've always wondered is whether or not google internally demotes websites containing no tracker scripts, on a presumption that "its owner is not working to track visitors/revenue, therefor it is not a serious candidate for these search terms." Even though a product landing page is clean, simple, succinct, and the end product is well received by real users in actually. I'm curious whether or not it's why earlier projects of mine seemed to gather regular organic search traffic and associated business without me even lifting a finger, other than braindead obvious correct usage of search index friendly html markup throughout, contrast to post 2013, when I build a new software product, launch a site for people to find and download it, making sure it looks clean and presentable, mobile friendly, loads quickly, ticks all the best practice boxes - it might as well not even exist. Pretty much the only search term it's considered for is the product name itself through word of mouth.
Re: (Score:2)
Ergo, my "analytics" consists of a few lines of C# code which runs against a folder of daily nginx logs, filters out bots/referrer spam and produces a simple table of what's been going on. It's not rocket science.
That's really good but it doesn't tell you things like age, gender, geo-location, and interests of your visitors. You might not care, of course.
One nagging question I've always wondered is whether or not google internally demotes websites containing no tracker scripts, on a presumption that "its owner is not working to track visitors/revenue, therefor it is not a serious candidate for these search terms."
Doesn't seem to. I only have one website to test this with, so the error bars are wide, but my answer is no.
Re: (Score:2)
Google analytics was the first permanent entry on my noscript. The entire concept is antithetical to consumer privacy.
Block It (Score:5, Insightful)
I have google-analytics.com set to Untrusted in NoScript. Privacy Badger blocks the whole domain by default. I suspect Firefox's tracking protection also blocks it.
This post gets extra irony points given Slashdot uses Google Analytics.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
I have google-analytics.com set to Untrusted in NoScript. Privacy Badger blocks the whole domain by default. I suspect Firefox's tracking protection also blocks it. This post gets extra irony points given Slashdot uses Google Analytics.
Did you ever go through and see just what all bullshit is being stopped by those two? Yikes!
I'm in a discussion with a person on a different board who was wanting to stop FB tracking. I told him to install a scriptblocker.
Next thing, another guy barges in saying I was talking bullshit - all you need to do is empty your cookies. Said he was a web developer, and got hysterical when I disagreed.
I guess he must have some reason for people to run all the scripts.
Re:Block It (Score:5, Interesting)
It's funny that you say that. I've done a fair bit of web-dev stuff over the years on the side. From a friends website (well, all of us, our file and game host) to concrete construction companies. One thing I have noticed is a lot of web-developers are just as retarded as some of the clients who want websites made. No wonder so many sites are trivial to hack.
I say "web-developers" very loosely though. Self-claimed web-developers who copy-pasted bits and pieces from Stackoverflow and the like until a website was done.
Exactly. I've done some websites as a learning experience, and then comparing them to "professional" done sites, I'm shocked, and not in a good way. Copy and paste is exactly what they are. What is exceptionally amazing is that these masters of html still can't produce a site that looks good on desktop and mobile.
But yeah, it seems that there are a lot of web developers who are not terribly adroit. I mean K. Ryste - he had to have some idea of what was in those scripts he was putting on his site. Ach, maybe he dosn't know what whois or wireshark is.
Re: (Score:2)
Most of the networks I'm on, someone else will have already cached the DNS lookups in the router anyway - the lookups aren't going to Google every time. The potential for detailed tracking there is a lot less than with a script having free reign to do whatever it wants.
Re: (Score:2)
NoScript and DNS blocking both together sounds ideal, but if I had to pick just one, I'd keep NoScript. Most of the networks I'm on, someone else will have already cached the DNS lookups in the router anyway - the lookups aren't going to Google every time. The potential for detailed tracking there is a lot less than with a script having free reign to do whatever it wants.
Exactly. Scripts are the child from hell. It's not only that they are tracking you, they can execute, and does anyone know one of the most compelling reasons behind ever increasing data caps for smartphones? you got it. My favorite personal anecdote from earlier times was when I downloaded a 40 Kbyte or so pdf file, and ended up downloading 40 megabytes worth of.....scripts mostly. There were many times I blew through my cap in a couple days back in the day.
Today if I have to use my smartphone for the in
Re: Block It (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I noticed similar on my phone, somehow Chrome was eating up even more data than YouTube. The WWW has truly gotten to a sad state when loading a few pages of text and images uses more bandwidth than streaming video for the same amount of time... It's barely any better than ActiveX plugins and Flash. Somewhat less likely to get you installed with a rootkit, though.
The internet is sick - very sick.
Re: (Score:2)
there's a list floating around, with all the dns names for facebooks servers. I just blackhole the entire set. facebook, doesn't exist, as far as DNS is concerned.
As long as they don't keep adding more. But both that and script blocking is good.
Re: (Score:2)
Have you checked?
I use Privacy Badger (2019.1.30), and www.google-analytics.com, as well as www.googletagmanager.com and www.googletagservices.com have got categorised under "The domains below don't appear to be tracking you".
Re: (Score:2)
You're right, seems I'd manually blocked it. Can't revert for some reason (bug?), so can't check what the default setting is.
Re: (Score:2)
So we should probably support Google Analytics because it's easy to block, unlikely self-hosted solutions which don't offer an easy to kill domain name.
Re: (Score:2)
Why would you care about self-hosted analytics? I don't mind if individual sites perform site-specific analytics. I just don't want any single company being able to track me across the entire web without my consent.
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, but slashdot readers know that if they host their own (free) analytics software, then they'll get unblocked results.
The only reasonable use case for Google Analytics is for sites that also run Google ads. In that case, it is basically a feature to leave out the adblocking visitors. :)
Re: (Score:2)
The sampling part is why I switched to Piwik (now named Matomo) about three years ago. It really sucks trying to find rare events with GA when all of the reports have such a small sample. We had problems that were happing thousands of times a day that wouldn't show-up on Google Analytics.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
nomoregoogle.com, which is mentioned in the article, has options for many Google services. I've been very happy with ProtonMail, though there are some inconveniences, like no full-content search with the web client (since that runs into decryption issues). Supposedly that's being worked on, though. Main thing I'm still looking for is a Calendar replacement, which doesn't appear on the nomoregoogle list.
Re: Wrong Question: One word too many. (Score:2)
This is an advertisement... (Score:1)
for a company that offers crippled open source version, and then expects you to pay a monthly subscription to get feature parity with Google.
Time? (Score:2)
I blocked Google Analytics on the router level years ago (so that it works on phones and tablets at home too) and I thought everybody did it.
Why in hell allow *any* analytics? (Score:3, Insightful)
Anyone? Give me a solid reason to do so.
Re: (Score:3)
If I visit your site, I have GA blocked. Unfortunately, you aren't getting the data but much more importantly, Google isn't. You may perhaps be trustworthy about not diving into personal information but they are known to be untrustworthy.
Re: (Score:2)
- Understanding where our daily volume comes from geographically. This let's us understand if we need to bolster mirror sites so they are more responsive
- Understand how many people consume our content using different languages. Without analytics, we wouldn't be able to budget accordingly to ensure we're meeting our global customer demands
- Performance management. Analytics tell us how quickly pages a
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Well, let's see...
- Because you want to know what pages of your site are being used, and which ones aren't.
- Because you want to know what browsers you need to support, based on what your users are using.
- Because you want to do A/B testing of a new feature.
- Because you want to know minute-by-minute the load on your Web server.
If you are running a personal site, then yeah, who cares. But if you have lots of users, who complain when things don't work, you need analytics. And...Google Analytics is easy to im
It depends. (Score:2)
Do you want to play super-nice with Google? Or do you need GAs features? Then a corporate account and tie everything concerning your website including analytics to it.
Other than that, use Piwik or whatever it's successor is called these days.
It's way past time (Score:5, Insightful)
GA is effectively dead. Millions of users are already blocking this and every other external service similar to it in existence. The result is data provided by these services is at very least incomplete.
If you want accurate figures install a stats package and parse your own web logs. It's not rocket science.
I don't think so. (Score:2)
Google Spying (Score:2)