Cloudflare's Privacy Crusade Continues With a Challenge To Google Analytics

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Fortune: Cloudflare is launching a privacy-friendly rival to Google Analytics. Google Analytics is a free toolkit that's used by website administrators across the globe to help them track the behavior of the people visiting those sites -- how they find them, what they do there, the devices they're using, and so on. However, the service -- the most popular of its kind -- also helps Google track websites' visitors, so it can better profile them for advertising purposes. This privacy-invasive aspect makes many people squeamish. And that's where Cloudflare would now like to step in.

Around its birthday every year, the decade-old company -- which went public last year -- announces a move intended to "give back" to the wider Internet community. These moves are often related to privacy. On Tuesday, it unveiled Cloudflare Web Analytics, a free-to-use toolkit that largely replicates what Google Analytics offers -- minus the invasive tracking, and thus the ability to assess the performance of targeted ads carried on websites. Cloudflare Web Analytics is immediately available to the company's paid customers, but any website owner will be able to use it from some point in the coming months. Cloudflare's scale is crucial here [...] because it takes substantial resources to run a free analytics platform, and Cloudflare already has a giant network that can support the load. Cloudflare Web Analytics isn't the company's only big announcement this week. "On Monday, Cloudflare launched a beta testing program for a cloud technology called Durable Objects," the report adds. "You can read the technical explanation here, but in essence this is a tool that allows developers of online services to make those services comply with the increasing number of data-localization and data-protection laws that limit where users' data is supposed to go."

"With Durable Objects, Cloudflare says, it is possible to specify where particular data will reside on Cloudflare's network, so -- for example -- a German user's data does not have to leave Germany. Or, with an eye to other current news, a service such as TikTok could ensure that U.S. users' data never leaves the U.S., without having to create a separate version of its service for that country."

The world is eating away at google

[mveloso]

Soon the only thing google'll be good at is selling advertising. Oh wait...

Article real reading

[will4]

> Google Analytics is a free toolkit that's used by website administrators across the globe to help them track the behavior of the people visiting those sites

Should be

Website administrators hoping to scratch out an advertising subsistence farming existence are helping Google build dossier's on billions of people without those person's knowledge.

DIY

[Tablizer]

A quick DIY solution is to include a tiny borderless "iframe" tag that calls a blank page that saves HTTP meta data to a log file or database. You may need to send a Page-ID via a URL parameter in some cases.

"Privacy-invasive"?

[Sebby]

This privacy-invasive aspect makes many people squeamish

I call it privacy-raping.

Good to know

[nospam007]

Another site to block at the router level.

Re:

[Aighearach]

lol that's dumb, and an excess of work. It implies your desktops are unprotected. Just pull your damn pants up and install uMatrix.

Re:

[DontBeAMoran]

Yes let's all install uMatrix on Android iPhone, Nintendo Wii Switch, Xbox One Series X Pro, Sega Playstation 5, etc.

There's more to this world than Windows, macOS and Linux, dude.

Re: Good to know

[t4eXanadu]

"Android iPhone"? Anyway, this is why you should run your own Pi-Hole server, set your router to use the Pi-Hole server as DNS, and then all of your devices will be covered. Out and about? Set up an OpenVPN server (it's easy, but the pivpn project makes it trivial) and have that use the Pi-Hole server as DNS, too.

Cloudflare

[bjwest]

Can kiss my ass until they allow me to accept the risk and load the page anyway.

CloudFlare "privacy"

[ptaff]

Don't be fooled, CloudFlare has nothing to do with privacy. It MITMs a large proportion of the web traffic, decrypting data between clients and servers. It's thus able to collect very high quality personal information, the kind you enter to do online shopping (credit card numbers, postal address, phone number, real name, ...).

Re:CloudFlare "privacy"

[PraiseBob]

I understand the skepticism with their business model. But, at the end of the day, all of their revenue comes from selling security and privacy services. Their entire mission statement is centered around trust and transparency. I'm confident they would be caught and go out of business if they started stealing customer data as a side gig.

Re:

[Aighearach]

What they mean is, Google collects and sells some information that Cloudflare doesn't have a market for.

So the parts they don't know how to sell, those parts will have privacy. It doesn't imply their systems support privacy in the general case.

Re:

[AmiMoJo]

That is incorrect. While it's true that on the free tiers you use Cloudflare's certs and they get unencrypted traffic, in that case your site was unencrypted anyway. For actually secure stuff you can still use your own certs and they can't see the plaintext.

Re:

[drinkypoo]

"That is incorrect. While it's true that on the free tiers you use Cloudflare's certs and they get unencrypted traffic, in that case your site was unencrypted anyway."

I'm not paying for encryption, but my traffic is encrypted. If you want, anyway.

Once more with feeling

[Otis B. Dilroy III]

I think that giant tech companies are in for rough decade

Google is the accomplice, site owners the culprit

[ffkom]

The article makes it sound as if "web site administrators" had basically no choice other than to use "analytics" services to grab data from their visitors. The truth is that "web site administrators" can just as well not privacy-rape their visitors, and just not use any kind of "analytics" on them, neither from Google, nor CloudFlare or anyone else.

People need to be reminded that for the longest time in history, no newspaper printer, no TV broadcaster or Radio station "required" to grab and sell their user

Re:

[Toonol]

no newspaper printer, no TV broadcaster or Radio station "required" to grab and sell their users data.

They always did, desperately, as far as technology allowed them. Newspaper subscriber names and addresses were bought and traded, charging more for customers from higher-income zip codes. Radio companies had 3rd parties analyzing the demographic makeup of their listeners, and deliberately sacrificed some listeners for the ones advertisers were more interested in. Television did the same.

Re:

[DontBeAMoran]

If your client demands Google Analytics and Facebook integration, what do you do?

Non-event

[GoRK]

I am a paying CloudFlare customer and agree that it's pretty rich of them to call out Google Analytics as a giant privacy concern considering the nature of their own product.

Also I checked out the web analytics product and it is ... well it's amazing they got so much press about it. It's marginally better than the previous stats they offered before. If it hadn't been for this overly effusive article I can say that I would not have really paid it much mind. It's great to have it in the dashboard, but a subst

Why has no one mentioned matomo?

[Can'tNot]

We already have [matomo.org] an alternative to Google Analytics which respects privacy, and have had it for many years now (it used to be called pwik). Not that we can't always have another one, and it would be nice to have one with a greater degree of visibility so that web developers might actually use it... I sometimes think that the biggest problem with open source projects is that they don't have marketing budgets.

And we should trust Cloudflare - why?

[OneHundredAndTen]

Because they aver that they are going to be good? As in Google's Don't Be Evil?