As a site owner, it is disingenuous showing your users a banner that says "This site uses cookies to allow us to maintain state" while leaving out the part about "This site uses google analytics which allows Google to track you across sites and build nearly complete picture of every page you browse".

The smaller hosted analytics systems claim to be more privacy oriented but I don't trust them either. Even with the best of intentions, sooner-or-later they will be sold or pivot. The data is just too valuable.

I know that some sites live and die by close reading of analytics but most sites don't need anything as elaborate. I implemented a very simple page counter than I host myself but that is just for vanity. Most sites don't even need that.

What sorts of data items do you collect, though?

That's another way we're transparent. Anyone who knows code can see exactly how we collect data and what data we collect.

Note I'm not saying you are doing anything nefarious but that the source code been available isn't sufficient alone.

What about people who don't know code?

  <script>
    (function(i,s,o,g,r,a,m){i['GoogleAnalyticsObject']=r;i[r]=i[r]||function(){
    (i[r].q=i[r].q||[]).push(arguments)},i[r].l=1*new Date();a=s.createElement(o),
    m=s.getElementsByTagName(o)[0];a.async=1;a.src=g;m.parentNode.insertBefore(a,m)
    })(window,document,'script','//www.google-analytics.com/analytics.js','ga');

    ga('create', 'UA-4300461-2', 'auto');
    ga('create', 'UA-4300461-33', 'auto', {'name': 'rollup'});
    
      ga('rollup.set', 'dimension1', 'fastcompany');
    
      ga('rollup.set', 'dimension2', 'co-design');
    
      ga('rollup.set', 'dimension6', '2019-02-01');

Likewise, the sales teams have pretty well 0 (and that's a big zero) control over published editorial content. But they have a lot of pull in implementing any and all kinds of analytics, a/b testing, and so on.

This doesn't surprise me at all. But it is funny.

It's extremely hard to get rid of Google out of your life

Just turn off javascript.

I stumble upon Reinvigorate.net, it has potential, but it was acquired by Adobe if I remember correctly.

There was Gaug.es, it got acquired by Github, then it sat there and no more active development.

There was Gosquared, I cant remember why it didn't fit ( Needs to look again )

There was Clicky, one of the cheapest around, and does all tracking metrics you will need. Except the UI... doesn't really make you want to use it.

The two shown in the article, Simple and Fathom, were lacking way too many information. Browser, Resolution, Devices, Location etc.

The best thing that came out in the last few years were GoAccess. Self Hosted log analyser, except not everyone wants the hassle of setting it up.

The closest thing to something I want would be Ghostboard, unfortunately it only works for Ghost.

There are real issues with privacy, but the scaremongering sometimes seems to be independent of any actual harm to users.

If the gains are worth the risk, then that's fine, but there's nothing "scaremongering" about pointing out things that could go wrong. That's at least half of engineering as a discipline.

"The worst thing that could happen if I put my money in a bank is they take all my money. So, we shouldn't put money in banks."

If you point out that this generally doesn't happen people will talk about what the company could do.

How do we get beyond fully general arguments that you can never trust any company to do anything (or alternatively that theoretical risks don't matter)? I guess to really understand the risk you'd have to understand a company's internal controls, and those generally aren't public.

In the case of analytics, this would be particularly egregious: the user gives up privacy to a third party, generally without knowledge and with no direct benefit.

If I log all the hits to my website and generate aggregate reports based on that, there's no personal information disclosed in the reports. Nobody is harmed and they have no case, as far as I'm concerned. It's the same if I'm outsourcing to Google.

But, the thing is the example you gave is just a matter of degree. I mean, if you sold the logs with PII, location info, etc, then that would be near the other end of the privacy continuum. And, since you explicitly provided an example that included aggregate vs personal info, then I assume even you would care about the latter.

So, the question is, at what point along the continuum do you begin to care? Following that, surely you'd allow that others may choose a different point and that, given that it's their privacy, maybe their concerns shouldn't be summarily dismissed?

But, beyond that, the example you gave is invalid. There is a qualitative difference between you logging information about visitors who have chosen to visit your site, versus participating in a scheme to provide that information to a third party who your visitor did not choose to visit. This is especially so when that third party is then able to compile a dossier on that visitor's broader behavior, based on other site-owners who participate.

Add to this that Google is frequently able to personally identify that visitor via their Google login.

I'm not sure any of them are threatened by Google Analytics? Google's terms of use prohibit uploading PII to Google Analytics, and it appears they upload data to a separate domain [1], so at least if you don't enable the DoubleClick cookie (which, if you're responsible you shouldn't do), they don't seem to have a way to correlate Google Analytics data with Google logins.

But I only did a shallow investigation. show me the risk and threat model and I'll care.

[1] https://developers.google.com/analytics/resources/concepts/g...

Google is embedded like a tick across the internet and getting rid of it is really really hard.

Of course you'd need to glue the data together with whatever you have, but it's not really that hard to do.

The only way a business changes is when there's a detectable impact on their income.

Or when they're legally required to.

Or when a new upper management come in with a different philosophy or approach (Microsoft's new CEO is often credited here on HN as changing Microsoft's attitude towards open source).

Or when the company's employees protest effectively enough (see the recent Google employee revolts).

And I guess it will only be a matter of time before robots will start doing this too, so please don't tell anyone ;-)

They always seem to make me "play" their stupid "find the cars" game a lot longer when I quickly choose them. 20 minutes straight one time. Yeah I felt violated. It was on my stupid state unemployment benefits application page. Talk about being kicked while you're down. Not only do I have to convince the state I'm a citizen and eligible, I have to convince google I'm not a robot first.

That's probably a natural side-effect. I don't notice because, personally, when I'm presented with a captcha I usually just move on and make a mental note to not use that site anymore.

problem is im sure they use captcha for fingerprinting too (and google fonts but that's a whole other can of worms)

It has also been (somewhat officially) stated that GA data is not used for ranking purposes, but make of that what you will.

Since they also render pages themselves, they don't really need client page load metrics to evaluate rendering performance.