11 ms·

Safari now blocks Google Analytics on sites, new Privacy Report feature shows

170 points by imheretolearn 6y ago

panpanna 6y ago
How about the 500 other tracking/analytics companies? Even Adobe is now in analytics business.
- yuribro 6y ago
  From the screenshot in the article, it looks like many other trackers are blocked as well. It's just less title worthy than Google's.
- XCSme 6y ago
  I think the biggest problem is one entity having insights on all web users and all the sites they visit. If each site had their own internal analytics, which are limited to that domain only and maybe only session-bassed, the privacy improvements would be huge.
- saagarjha 6y ago
  Adobe is on my list, affiliated with the domain "demdex.net".
  - duskwuff 6y ago
    Every time I see that domain name, I think of skin mites (Demodex folliculorum).
- tatersolid 6y ago
  Adobe somehow hosts critical CSS assets for some adobe.com pages using their tracking domain(s), resulting in a broken page in Firefox due to tracking protection. I think they do this to encourage people to turn off FF or other tracking protection. Instead they lost an enterprise license renewal as I was “encouraged” to look elsewhere.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
TazeTSchnitzel 6y ago
Suggestion: the access logs your web server collects are enough for basic analytics, and if you are curious for more, you can manually instrument your site a little. You don't need to give Google the power to spy on your users.
- nwellnhof 6y ago
  Here's another suggestion: Learn how to configure Google Analytics properly. https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1011397?hl=en https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1011397?hl=en "If all [data sharing] settings are OFF, your Analytics data is only used to provide and maintain the Analytics service."
  - TazeTSchnitzel 6y ago
    IIRC you can thank Mozilla for that setting!
  - jesterson 6y ago
    Weill, this only "works" for you if you trust google. Given multiple security incidents in the past I am certainly not one of those people.
    - bad_user 6y ago
      What security incidents?
    - kinkrtyavimoodh 6y ago
      What security incidents? Of all tech companies I'd feel most secure with Google being the stewards of my data.
      - hyperman1 6y ago
        Snowden. They were leaking a lot of data to the NSA and they didn't even know. Of course, they upped their game since then, but their sheer size will always make them an interesting target and they have to fail only once.
dave_aiello 6y ago
I have no love for Google Analytics, but as a small-scale publisher, I have serious questions about what tools can replace it: 1) Which analytics can a website employ that is not geared toward enriching the analytics platform developer by violating site visitor privacy? 2) Do those analytics mechanisms have any kind of aftermarket, such that third-party developers integrate it into publishing platforms that publishers use. 3) What do those analytics mechanisms and the associated tooling cost?
- simcop2387 6y ago
  I'm not sure about all of your questions but there's platforms like matomo out there, that seem to be able to handle some of the use cases for ga. Matomo: #1 Secure Open Web Analytics Platform https://matomo.org/ https://matomo.org/
- justinclift 6y ago
  Goat Counter (yeah, weird name) seems to be getting popular, and it's Open Source: https://www.goatcounter.com https://www.goatcounter.com
- kall 6y ago
  I think collecting analytics from the server logs is going to get more popular again, though a problem for SPAs? We could call it Edge Analytics this time around and run it on cloudflare. For publishing systems, couldn't wordpress report back analytics data to itself, on its own domain? Something like that existed but i'm not sure if it was using Jetpack servers or not. If this isn't already possible, it seems like an obvious thing for someone privacy concious to build.
  - m90 6y ago
    This exists over here: https://github.com/ibericode/koko-analytics https://github.com/ibericode/koko-analytics - never used it myself though.
- jbob2000 6y ago
  For small-scale anything, the best analytics are simply talking to your customers.
zpeti 6y ago
That little rumour about Apple buying DuckDuckGo seem to make more and more sense by the day.
- nojito 6y ago
  DDG is also front and center in the Big Sur new features for safari page. https://www.apple.com/macos/big-sur-preview/ https://www.apple.com/macos/big-sur-preview/
  - doublerabbit 6y ago
    If you lookup street addresses within DDG it now returns a result with AppleMaps. I don't mind this but I hope they've partnered with Apple and not sold out.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - mcyukon 6y ago
      I've had that for what I though was 2 years, so I looked it up and it appears they partnered with Apple back in Jan 2019. https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/15/18183653/duckduckgo-apple-maps-local-search-mapkit-js-web https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/15/18183653/duckduckgo-apple...
- rchaud 6y ago
  If that happens, it's safe to assume that Apple will simply try to replicate Google's business model. iAds may have been a failure, but I would imagine digital ad market is simply too lucrative for Apple to leave to Google and Facebook (and Bing and Yahoo/Verizon) alone.
- StartupTree 6y ago
  Nonsense that Apple would buy DuckDuckGo. DGG is just a wrapper around Bing Search. Therefore Apple could recreate DGG from scratch in a month.
heavymark 6y ago
While it certainly blocks it by default in the new Safari beta, can anyone confirm if the existing Safari which already blocked third party trackers explicitly blocked google analytics?
gregoriol 6y ago
I'm wondering how self-hosted solutions like Matomo will be treated?
- XCSme 6y ago
  How do you think they should be treated?
gentleman11 6y ago
I used simpleanalytics for a bit and it was nice. Less granular data but that is by design.
tweetle_beetle 6y ago
Google Analytics is the default attribution tool for many (most?) small and medium sized digital marketing agencies. Most businesses have some kind of GA account set up with a few years of history and it's quick to leverage the data. With ad and taking blocking becoming more popular all the time, there will reach a tipping point where the data is unreliable enough that ROI can no longer be proved with it. It will be interesting to see what happens then in this space. Alternative attribution models, more insidious fingerprinting?
intopieces 6y ago
Shots fired - Apple will take Google’s money to be the default search engine but won’t let them track “their” users.
bactisme 6y ago
I really thinks it's a weird move. Safari user will disapear from our understanding of the web. We might not design and code for Safari because these users will become virtually innexistent. I am a small publisher, Safari users are demonetized , untracable, i might just say to them gtfo.
- speedgoose 6y ago
  Aren't safari users more rich on average, and more willing to spend money on your website? If you need to track your visitors without thinking about their privacy, perhaps your business model isn't great.
  - andy_ppp 6y ago
    Haha because surveillance capitalism isn’t making hundreds of billions with data!
- 0x0 6y ago
  That would be leaving a lot of money on the table up for grabs by your competitors that do know how to see through this situation.
com 6y ago
It’s time. GA does seem like a privacy destroying data grab and it’s so hard to argue with marketing because it’s free (for us). I like the fact that open source and managed analytics which is privacy-sensitive is becoming a thing. When looking for a privacy-sensitive analytics service I stumbled on https://plausible.io/ https://plausible.io/ which checked my boxes at the time. I imagine that there are more out there.
winrid 6y ago
Won't this be the norm with pushing to get rid of third party cookies? Or are we backpedaling on that now?
Jonnax 6y ago
What's a good tool for doing server side analytics? Like for a small site I've made for fun. The only way I can easily know how many users visit is via Google analytics. Well easily that is.
- renewiltord 6y ago
  When I was a child, I used AWStats. It's still around. Sorry this isn't of much help! Honestly I just wanted to reminisce :)
- sergeykish 6y ago
  I fetch logs and run https://goaccess.io/ https://goaccess.io/
TomAnthony 6y ago
This article is incorrect. There does not appear to be a change between Safari 13.1 and Safari 14 for how it handles GA. I have tested it myself. With Safari 13.1 Apple made a change [1] to their Intelligent Tracking Prevention that blocks all 3rd party cookies for cross site resources. The only change in Safari 14 appears to be that it reports which domains have had cookies blocked. The Google Analytics beacon is still sent by the browser. Benedict Evans (cited in article) since deleted his tweet, but this article seems not yet to have been updated. [1] https://webkit.org/blog/10218/full-third-party-cookie-blocking-and-more/ https://webkit.org/blog/10218/full-third-party-cookie-blocki...
- Twisell 6y ago
  Could someone translate this statement to something a layman might understand? (I'm not a web dev nor am I following SEO news closely enought) Do you imply that Apple is putting up a misleading interface in the new version of Safari where GA appear blocked while it actually isn't? That's a pretty bold assertion and the provided link is irrelevant on that. Again only looking for more information maybe I didn't get your point at all because I'm not in the SEO field.
  - saagarjha 6y ago
    No, it's that Safari is blocking third-parties under the same policies that it laid out earlier.
    - Twisell 6y ago
      Original commenter stated that > The Google Analytics beacon is still sent by the browser This is what I'd like some clarification about. Wether policy changed or if it is just a UI change is another subject. Do they actually block GA or not? And if not does the UI mislead users to think otherwise?
      - saagarjha 6y ago
        I'm not an expert on this either, but as far as I understand WebKit does not block beacon requests when you click on links. However, it does clear third-party cookies as it did before, which is described in the blog post. So what the commenter above is saying that this is showing instances where third-party cookies are being blocked, not where beacon requests are (which WebKit isn't interfering with). I haven't looked at the code for this in detail yet but from what I saw it seems that the implementation matched with this.
hkai 6y ago
Is there any chance that this is about reducing Google's competitive advantage and not really about users' privacy?
AJRF 6y ago
Federated analytics soon? - Google gives you a docker container and an API key to run that collects metrics on your public/own cloud, that gets slurped up to Google and you still get your demographic info.
- sergeykish 6y ago
  Clever, but could just send them logs
hkai 6y ago
Personally I am not at all concerned when my data is used for marketing. Instead, I like learning about products tailor-made for me. By privacy I understand not sharing data with the public or with the oppressive regimes when it may lead to harassment, firing or arrests of people. But using my data to sell me some watches or bike parts? I'm in.
- taurath 6y ago
  The internet is used for more than shopping. Your searches should not be public domain. Your health records. Your location. The time you go to bed at night. Where your house is. How many children you have. When you’ll next be away from home on vacation. That you looked around on a dating website while married. That you’re gay in a country where it carries the death penalty.
  - hkai 6y ago
    Is this currently public? I advertise on Facebook but I can't see anyone's searches or current location. Although I can target people who are interested in LGBT or people who have been to SFO recently. If they like my post, I can also see their name and photo. That seems reasonable to me.
- user5994461 6y ago
  What about using your data to send you malware and to steal money from your bank account for example? I've had to use safari on Mac. Sites are constantly trying to auto download dmg files (executables on mac) of malware. The most common ad is saying your mac is broken and needs to download an antivirus (that's fake and trying to get you to download a virus). Top google results for "download vlc" or equivalent search is pointing to fake websites distributing malware. All of this is the result of ads, analytics and mac detection. I've tried to setup ublock origin on safari but apple blocked safari extensions and doesn't allow to replace safari fully with another browser.
kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
Tag manager too?
- saagarjha 6y ago
  I see Google Tag Manager in my list.
Pete-Codes 6y ago
I've been using Simple Analytics since day one so I can kick back and relax I guess
raxxorrax 6y ago
This is pretty awesome. All browsers should do this with malware. I get that people like statistics, but if you share it with a third party, it can safely be condemned.
aabbcc1241 6y ago
If that's really the case, 3rd party analytic service can still work by taking over the traffic from the service domain, then proxy back the traffic to the web server, somehow like cloudflare.
lenwood 6y ago
I've done a bit more reading. This is not as dramatic as it seems. First party GA is not blocked. Access to 3rd party storage may be blocked, but this would not prevent web interactions from being visible to GA.
- gowld 6y ago
  What is the difference between First party and third party GA?
  - lenwood 6y ago
    Strictly speaking, GA is always 3rd party (it would only be 1st party if/when its used to measure google-analytics.com which is not a user-facing domain). For measuring any other website, its 3rd party. I believe that this would limit GA's ability to store data in cookies on my system (user or session-based attributes). GA could still create unique identifiers based on my user or session-based attributes and store those IDs on their own servers, then call them back up when I revisit the site. I'm still coming up to speed on this, maybe someone with more experience could correct or clarify my statements.
    - lmkg 6y ago
      In the context of web analytics, first-party vs third-party usually refers to how the user is identified, not to where the analytics status is hosted. Google Analytics uses first-party data for its tracking. Third-party tracking builds a universal profile of the user across the internet, first-party tracking builds user profiles that are silo'd to the website. Google Analytics stores a first-party cookie with a unique ID for each user. This is used to de-duplicate traffic from the same user to the same domain. This cookie not shared across websites. If you go to example.com and website.com, those are two different first-party cookies without views into each other. Optionally, Google Analytics can be configured correlated this with a third-party cookie from google.com for advertising purposes. This allows the website owner for example.com to connect a user converting on example.com to that same user having seen or clicked an ad on google.com. It also allows the website owner to target ads on google.com towards users based on their activity on example.com Previous iterations of Safari's ITP have outright blocked the third-party cookie, and have limited first-party cookies based on whether they're HTTP cookies or JavaScript cookies.
api 6y ago
We run Matomo (formerly Piwik), and I recommend it. It's actually better than Google Analytics in some ways, and you get your own data. This makes deeper analytics easier and also helps protect user privacy since the data is held only by the operators of the site being visited.
- XCSme 6y ago
  Are you happy with how fast the data loads in Matomo? I tried their online demo and everything load very slowly and content kept jumping around, it felt pretty bad in terms of UX.
  - Cenk 6y ago
    Agreed on this – everything in Matomo is slow and I find the UI clunky.
    - XCSme 6y ago
      I am actually working on an alternative ( https://usertrack.net/ https://usertrack.net/ ), even though I never used Matomo. I did try their demo a few days ago and, being so popular, I expected it to be really good, but it felt like an outdated platform that couldn't care less about UX.
- modoc 6y ago
  Piwik utterly failed (for me) for any semi-high traffic site. Simply couldn't hand large volume logs fast enough no matter what hardware we threw at it:(
mark_l_watson 6y ago
I am running the new betas iOS 14, iPadOS 14, and macOS Big Sur. I love this feature in Safari. You open a new tab or browser window and there is a message area letting you know what is being blocked. I am sick and tired of large tech companies like Facebook, Google, Amazon, etc. making money off of my data with scant benefit to me. Not to pick on Facebook and Google, but I only use them now (well, almost) for paid services. I happily pay Facebook for Oculus Quest hardware and entertainment. I happily pay Google for music, books, movies, and Google Cloud Platform (which I personally like much better than AWS).
Razengan 6y ago
Good. Currently I have to modify my hosts file or use something like NextDNS to block Google and others from gathering data from me even when I’m not explicitly using their services.
3pt14159 6y ago
I wish Apple would enable this at the OS level, though in the long run it won't matter. People will proxy requests and find all sorts of ways around it. It's an arms race with billions of dollars on one side and a vague sense of "privacy would be nice" on the other.
hardikgupta 6y ago
This is not new. Safari has been blocking third-party cookies for a while. Even Chrome offers this setting now. With that setting turned on, Chrome will also block Google Analytics when you are not on a google.com page.
heavymark 6y ago
The webkit engineer behind "Safari’s Intelligent Tracking Prevention" on Twitter confirmed when asked there have been no changes to how it blocks GA in the new version, it just is now visible in the report. And details, ITP doesn’t block loads, it blocks cookie access, deletes cookies and website data for sites you don’t interact with, downgrades referrers, and more. Its cookie blocking applies to all third parties." I responded that it seems all the new sites are reporting that GA is now being blocked/prevented in the new version are incorrect then. And these headlines appearing on Hacker News it looks like will only further unintentionally spread that misinformation.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

170 points by imheretolearn 6y ago

panpanna 6y ago

How about the 500 other tracking/analytics companies? Even Adobe is now in analytics business.

yuribro 6y ago
From the screenshot in the article, it looks like many other trackers are blocked as well. It's just less title worthy than Google's.
XCSme 6y ago
I think the biggest problem is one entity having insights on all web users and all the sites they visit. If each site had their own internal analytics, which are limited to that domain only and maybe only session-bassed, the privacy improvements would be huge.
saagarjha 6y ago
Adobe is on my list, affiliated with the domain "demdex.net".
- duskwuff 6y ago
  Every time I see that domain name, I think of skin mites (Demodex folliculorum).
tatersolid 6y ago
Adobe somehow hosts critical CSS assets for some adobe.com pages using their tracking domain(s), resulting in a broken page in Firefox due to tracking protection. I think they do this to encourage people to turn off FF or other tracking protection. Instead they lost an enterprise license renewal as I was “encouraged” to look elsewhere.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

TazeTSchnitzel 6y ago

Suggestion: the access logs your web server collects are enough for basic analytics, and if you are curious for more, you can manually instrument your site a little. You don't need to give Google the power to spy on your users.

nwellnhof 6y ago
Here's another suggestion: Learn how to configure Google Analytics properly. https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1011397?hl=en https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1011397?hl=en "If all [data sharing] settings are OFF, your Analytics data is only used to provide and maintain the Analytics service."
- TazeTSchnitzel 6y ago
  IIRC you can thank Mozilla for that setting!
- jesterson 6y ago
  Weill, this only "works" for you if you trust google. Given multiple security incidents in the past I am certainly not one of those people.
  - bad_user 6y ago
    What security incidents?
  - kinkrtyavimoodh 6y ago
    What security incidents? Of all tech companies I'd feel most secure with Google being the stewards of my data.
    - hyperman1 6y ago
      Snowden. They were leaking a lot of data to the NSA and they didn't even know. Of course, they upped their game since then, but their sheer size will always make them an interesting target and they have to fail only once.

dave_aiello 6y ago

I have no love for Google Analytics, but as a small-scale publisher, I have serious questions about what tools can replace it: 1) Which analytics can a website employ that is not geared toward enriching the analytics platform developer by violating site visitor privacy? 2) Do those analytics mechanisms have any kind of aftermarket, such that third-party developers integrate it into publishing platforms that publishers use. 3) What do those analytics mechanisms and the associated tooling cost?

simcop2387 6y ago
I'm not sure about all of your questions but there's platforms like matomo out there, that seem to be able to handle some of the use cases for ga. Matomo: #1 Secure Open Web Analytics Platform https://matomo.org/ https://matomo.org/
justinclift 6y ago
Goat Counter (yeah, weird name) seems to be getting popular, and it's Open Source: https://www.goatcounter.com https://www.goatcounter.com
kall 6y ago
I think collecting analytics from the server logs is going to get more popular again, though a problem for SPAs? We could call it Edge Analytics this time around and run it on cloudflare. For publishing systems, couldn't wordpress report back analytics data to itself, on its own domain? Something like that existed but i'm not sure if it was using Jetpack servers or not. If this isn't already possible, it seems like an obvious thing for someone privacy concious to build.
- m90 6y ago
  This exists over here: https://github.com/ibericode/koko-analytics https://github.com/ibericode/koko-analytics - never used it myself though.
jbob2000 6y ago
For small-scale anything, the best analytics are simply talking to your customers.

zpeti 6y ago

That little rumour about Apple buying DuckDuckGo seem to make more and more sense by the day.

nojito 6y ago
DDG is also front and center in the Big Sur new features for safari page. https://www.apple.com/macos/big-sur-preview/ https://www.apple.com/macos/big-sur-preview/
- doublerabbit 6y ago
  If you lookup street addresses within DDG it now returns a result with AppleMaps. I don't mind this but I hope they've partnered with Apple and not sold out.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - mcyukon 6y ago
    I've had that for what I though was 2 years, so I looked it up and it appears they partnered with Apple back in Jan 2019. https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/15/18183653/duckduckgo-apple-maps-local-search-mapkit-js-web https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/15/18183653/duckduckgo-apple...
rchaud 6y ago
If that happens, it's safe to assume that Apple will simply try to replicate Google's business model. iAds may have been a failure, but I would imagine digital ad market is simply too lucrative for Apple to leave to Google and Facebook (and Bing and Yahoo/Verizon) alone.
StartupTree 6y ago
Nonsense that Apple would buy DuckDuckGo. DGG is just a wrapper around Bing Search. Therefore Apple could recreate DGG from scratch in a month.

heavymark 6y ago

While it certainly blocks it by default in the new Safari beta, can anyone confirm if the existing Safari which already blocked third party trackers explicitly blocked google analytics?

gregoriol 6y ago

I'm wondering how self-hosted solutions like Matomo will be treated?

XCSme 6y ago
How do you think they should be treated?

gentleman11 6y ago

I used simpleanalytics for a bit and it was nice. Less granular data but that is by design.

tweetle_beetle 6y ago

Google Analytics is the default attribution tool for many (most?) small and medium sized digital marketing agencies. Most businesses have some kind of GA account set up with a few years of history and it's quick to leverage the data. With ad and taking blocking becoming more popular all the time, there will reach a tipping point where the data is unreliable enough that ROI can no longer be proved with it. It will be interesting to see what happens then in this space. Alternative attribution models, more insidious fingerprinting?

intopieces 6y ago

Shots fired - Apple will take Google’s money to be the default search engine but won’t let them track “their” users.

bactisme 6y ago

I really thinks it's a weird move. Safari user will disapear from our understanding of the web. We might not design and code for Safari because these users will become virtually innexistent. I am a small publisher, Safari users are demonetized , untracable, i might just say to them gtfo.

speedgoose 6y ago
Aren't safari users more rich on average, and more willing to spend money on your website? If you need to track your visitors without thinking about their privacy, perhaps your business model isn't great.
- andy_ppp 6y ago
  Haha because surveillance capitalism isn’t making hundreds of billions with data!
0x0 6y ago
That would be leaving a lot of money on the table up for grabs by your competitors that do know how to see through this situation.

com 6y ago

It’s time. GA does seem like a privacy destroying data grab and it’s so hard to argue with marketing because it’s free (for us). I like the fact that open source and managed analytics which is privacy-sensitive is becoming a thing. When looking for a privacy-sensitive analytics service I stumbled on https://plausible.io/ https://plausible.io/ which checked my boxes at the time. I imagine that there are more out there.

winrid 6y ago

Won't this be the norm with pushing to get rid of third party cookies? Or are we backpedaling on that now?

Jonnax 6y ago

What's a good tool for doing server side analytics? Like for a small site I've made for fun. The only way I can easily know how many users visit is via Google analytics. Well easily that is.

renewiltord 6y ago
When I was a child, I used AWStats. It's still around. Sorry this isn't of much help! Honestly I just wanted to reminisce :)
sergeykish 6y ago
I fetch logs and run https://goaccess.io/ https://goaccess.io/

TomAnthony 6y ago

This article is incorrect. There does not appear to be a change between Safari 13.1 and Safari 14 for how it handles GA. I have tested it myself. With Safari 13.1 Apple made a change [1] to their Intelligent Tracking Prevention that blocks all 3rd party cookies for cross site resources. The only change in Safari 14 appears to be that it reports which domains have had cookies blocked. The Google Analytics beacon is still sent by the browser. Benedict Evans (cited in article) since deleted his tweet, but this article seems not yet to have been updated. [1] https://webkit.org/blog/10218/full-third-party-cookie-blocking-and-more/ https://webkit.org/blog/10218/full-third-party-cookie-blocki...

Twisell 6y ago
Could someone translate this statement to something a layman might understand? (I'm not a web dev nor am I following SEO news closely enought) Do you imply that Apple is putting up a misleading interface in the new version of Safari where GA appear blocked while it actually isn't? That's a pretty bold assertion and the provided link is irrelevant on that. Again only looking for more information maybe I didn't get your point at all because I'm not in the SEO field.
- saagarjha 6y ago
  No, it's that Safari is blocking third-parties under the same policies that it laid out earlier.
  - Twisell 6y ago
    Original commenter stated that > The Google Analytics beacon is still sent by the browser This is what I'd like some clarification about. Wether policy changed or if it is just a UI change is another subject. Do they actually block GA or not? And if not does the UI mislead users to think otherwise?
    - saagarjha 6y ago
      I'm not an expert on this either, but as far as I understand WebKit does not block beacon requests when you click on links. However, it does clear third-party cookies as it did before, which is described in the blog post. So what the commenter above is saying that this is showing instances where third-party cookies are being blocked, not where beacon requests are (which WebKit isn't interfering with). I haven't looked at the code for this in detail yet but from what I saw it seems that the implementation matched with this.

hkai 6y ago

Is there any chance that this is about reducing Google's competitive advantage and not really about users' privacy?

AJRF 6y ago

Federated analytics soon? - Google gives you a docker container and an API key to run that collects metrics on your public/own cloud, that gets slurped up to Google and you still get your demographic info.

sergeykish 6y ago
Clever, but could just send them logs

hkai 6y ago

Personally I am not at all concerned when my data is used for marketing. Instead, I like learning about products tailor-made for me. By privacy I understand not sharing data with the public or with the oppressive regimes when it may lead to harassment, firing or arrests of people. But using my data to sell me some watches or bike parts? I'm in.

taurath 6y ago
The internet is used for more than shopping. Your searches should not be public domain. Your health records. Your location. The time you go to bed at night. Where your house is. How many children you have. When you’ll next be away from home on vacation. That you looked around on a dating website while married. That you’re gay in a country where it carries the death penalty.
- hkai 6y ago
  Is this currently public? I advertise on Facebook but I can't see anyone's searches or current location. Although I can target people who are interested in LGBT or people who have been to SFO recently. If they like my post, I can also see their name and photo. That seems reasonable to me.
user5994461 6y ago
What about using your data to send you malware and to steal money from your bank account for example? I've had to use safari on Mac. Sites are constantly trying to auto download dmg files (executables on mac) of malware. The most common ad is saying your mac is broken and needs to download an antivirus (that's fake and trying to get you to download a virus). Top google results for "download vlc" or equivalent search is pointing to fake websites distributing malware. All of this is the result of ads, analytics and mac detection. I've tried to setup ublock origin on safari but apple blocked safari extensions and doesn't allow to replace safari fully with another browser.

kevin_thibedeau 6y ago

Tag manager too?

saagarjha 6y ago
I see Google Tag Manager in my list.

Pete-Codes 6y ago

I've been using Simple Analytics since day one so I can kick back and relax I guess

raxxorrax 6y ago

This is pretty awesome. All browsers should do this with malware. I get that people like statistics, but if you share it with a third party, it can safely be condemned.

aabbcc1241 6y ago

If that's really the case, 3rd party analytic service can still work by taking over the traffic from the service domain, then proxy back the traffic to the web server, somehow like cloudflare.

lenwood 6y ago

I've done a bit more reading. This is not as dramatic as it seems. First party GA is not blocked. Access to 3rd party storage may be blocked, but this would not prevent web interactions from being visible to GA.

gowld 6y ago
What is the difference between First party and third party GA?
- lenwood 6y ago
  Strictly speaking, GA is always 3rd party (it would only be 1st party if/when its used to measure google-analytics.com which is not a user-facing domain). For measuring any other website, its 3rd party. I believe that this would limit GA's ability to store data in cookies on my system (user or session-based attributes). GA could still create unique identifiers based on my user or session-based attributes and store those IDs on their own servers, then call them back up when I revisit the site. I'm still coming up to speed on this, maybe someone with more experience could correct or clarify my statements.
  - lmkg 6y ago
    In the context of web analytics, first-party vs third-party usually refers to how the user is identified, not to where the analytics status is hosted. Google Analytics uses first-party data for its tracking. Third-party tracking builds a universal profile of the user across the internet, first-party tracking builds user profiles that are silo'd to the website. Google Analytics stores a first-party cookie with a unique ID for each user. This is used to de-duplicate traffic from the same user to the same domain. This cookie not shared across websites. If you go to example.com and website.com, those are two different first-party cookies without views into each other. Optionally, Google Analytics can be configured correlated this with a third-party cookie from google.com for advertising purposes. This allows the website owner for example.com to connect a user converting on example.com to that same user having seen or clicked an ad on google.com. It also allows the website owner to target ads on google.com towards users based on their activity on example.com Previous iterations of Safari's ITP have outright blocked the third-party cookie, and have limited first-party cookies based on whether they're HTTP cookies or JavaScript cookies.

api 6y ago

We run Matomo (formerly Piwik), and I recommend it. It's actually better than Google Analytics in some ways, and you get your own data. This makes deeper analytics easier and also helps protect user privacy since the data is held only by the operators of the site being visited.

XCSme 6y ago
Are you happy with how fast the data loads in Matomo? I tried their online demo and everything load very slowly and content kept jumping around, it felt pretty bad in terms of UX.
- Cenk 6y ago
  Agreed on this – everything in Matomo is slow and I find the UI clunky.
  - XCSme 6y ago
    I am actually working on an alternative ( https://usertrack.net/ https://usertrack.net/ ), even though I never used Matomo. I did try their demo a few days ago and, being so popular, I expected it to be really good, but it felt like an outdated platform that couldn't care less about UX.
modoc 6y ago
Piwik utterly failed (for me) for any semi-high traffic site. Simply couldn't hand large volume logs fast enough no matter what hardware we threw at it:(

mark_l_watson 6y ago

I am running the new betas iOS 14, iPadOS 14, and macOS Big Sur. I love this feature in Safari. You open a new tab or browser window and there is a message area letting you know what is being blocked. I am sick and tired of large tech companies like Facebook, Google, Amazon, etc. making money off of my data with scant benefit to me. Not to pick on Facebook and Google, but I only use them now (well, almost) for paid services. I happily pay Facebook for Oculus Quest hardware and entertainment. I happily pay Google for music, books, movies, and Google Cloud Platform (which I personally like much better than AWS).

Razengan 6y ago

Good. Currently I have to modify my hosts file or use something like NextDNS to block Google and others from gathering data from me even when I’m not explicitly using their services.

3pt14159 6y ago

I wish Apple would enable this at the OS level, though in the long run it won't matter. People will proxy requests and find all sorts of ways around it. It's an arms race with billions of dollars on one side and a vague sense of "privacy would be nice" on the other.

hardikgupta 6y ago

This is not new. Safari has been blocking third-party cookies for a while. Even Chrome offers this setting now. With that setting turned on, Chrome will also block Google Analytics when you are not on a google.com page.

heavymark 6y ago

The webkit engineer behind "Safari’s Intelligent Tracking Prevention" on Twitter confirmed when asked there have been no changes to how it blocks GA in the new version, it just is now visible in the report. And details, ITP doesn’t block loads, it blocks cookie access, deletes cookies and website data for sites you don’t interact with, downgrades referrers, and more. Its cookie blocking applies to all third parties." I responded that it seems all the new sites are reporting that GA is now being blocked/prevented in the new version are incorrect then. And these headlines appearing on Hacker News it looks like will only further unintentionally spread that misinformation.

deleted 6y ago

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