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Very few websites are truly owned by the creators, and webmasters have forever added countless bells and whistles onto their website without a care in the world

by blindm 6y ago

Very few websites are truly owned by the creators, and webmasters have forever added countless bells and whistles onto their website without a care in the world, until now. Now people are more privacy conscious (which is a good thing). Personally I like to get my analytics from AWStats[0] which offers a really raw look at your visitors and even allows you to see each visitor along with attached metadata like useragent, timestamp etc. I like the fact AWStats is not a traditional analytics application, but specifically a log-file-analyzer and it even captures those users who have JS disabled who are trying to avoid analytics scripts. As for the privacy of AWStats: people are going to leave behind logs, no matter what you do to avoid that. It's a fact of life of the web. What is more invasive of privacy would be recording the mouse or keystrokes using some JS; that's where I draw the line. [0] https://www.awstats.org/ https://www.awstats.org/

NineStarPoint 6y ago
While people have become more privacy conscious, as far as I can tell it hasn’t actually had any effect on an appreciable amount of user’s habits (well, at least we’ve gone from 15% to 25% of users using an ad blocker in the last 5 years). Either people say the care but in actuality have it lower on their priority list than things like the web working smoothly and getting things for free, or consumers feel hopeless to actually have any control over the situation and are hoping for government intervention. (I personally lean towards the issue being that it’s hard to beat free. While theoretically people might pay 6 bucks a year for a facebook style service if it existed, network effects make getting such a service started close to impossible. Such maps out to all the free stuff supported by advertising.) I agree with the general consensus of this thread that gathering stats for website specific use isn’t an issue, and that the issue is the big aggregators like google and facebook that are plugged into websites everywhere. The big thing I don’t have the numbers for is how refusing to use a google style service impacts ad revenue. About 15 minutes of searching hasn’t gotten me any closer to figuring it out either.

by blindm 6y ago

NineStarPoint 6y ago

While people have become more privacy conscious, as far as I can tell it hasn’t actually had any effect on an appreciable amount of user’s habits (well, at least we’ve gone from 15% to 25% of users using an ad blocker in the last 5 years). Either people say the care but in actuality have it lower on their priority list than things like the web working smoothly and getting things for free, or consumers feel hopeless to actually have any control over the situation and are hoping for government intervention. (I personally lean towards the issue being that it’s hard to beat free. While theoretically people might pay 6 bucks a year for a facebook style service if it existed, network effects make getting such a service started close to impossible. Such maps out to all the free stuff supported by advertising.) I agree with the general consensus of this thread that gathering stats for website specific use isn’t an issue, and that the issue is the big aggregators like google and facebook that are plugged into websites everywhere. The big thing I don’t have the numbers for is how refusing to use a google style service impacts ad revenue. About 15 minutes of searching hasn’t gotten me any closer to figuring it out either.