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Do open source analytics frameworks exist? (e.g. Google Analytics)
Do open source analytics frameworks exist? (e.g. Google Analytics) If so, what are a few good ones? If not, why not, and what can ethically-minded developers do to help?
Long-version:
This question is in response to an earlier submission here:
UK Government's Payment Infrastructure Is Now Open Source - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15070463
Every time this comes up, I think about asking this question, but I somehow forget: is there an open source analytics framework? It doesn't have to be comprehensive or easy-to-use like Google Analytics, but its very existence would be at least a start towards working on something that accomplishes the developer's/organization's goal of using user behaviour as input to iterative product design while protecting user security and privacy in accordance with government policies and/or ethical standards.
On one hand, I sympathize with people who say, "any information that anyone else collects on my with or without my consent is too much information". However, I think the user-tracking equivalent Pandora's box has sort of been unleashed upon the world, and putting all the contents back therein is effectively untenable.
Thank you all in advance for your participation in sharing both your knowledge, experience, data, and anecdotes!
- brunoalano 9y agoPiwik
- mindcrime 9y agoYep. Web analytics LONG predate Google Analytics, at least when you consider the server-side logfile based systems that you can use when you control the webserver directly. Things like AWStats and Analog let you do analytics on Apache Server logs forever ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_web_analytics_software#Free_.2F_Open_source_.28FLOSS.29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_web_analytics_software...