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Lets examine these "claims" a bit more closely... It’s a bloated script that affects your site speed Everything affects sites-peed. However its 19KB, thats

Lets examine these "claims" a bit more closely... It’s a bloated script that affects your site speed Everything affects sites-peed. However its 19KB, thats not awful. It’s overkill for the majority of site owners Yes, agreed. But so what. It’s a privacy liability and requires an extensive privacy policy Would be nice if if it offered specifics on the "liability" but it does not. And for the weight of an "extensive privacy policy", I'm not buying this as a great reason. It worsens the user experience due to the necessity of annoying prompts. Again, what!? I'm not seeing these prompts. It’s blocked by many browsers (e.g. Firefox) so the data is not very accurate. And its blocked by ad-blockers and so much more. The point is to know what your users do. Its good to know you got 1M unique visitors last month, but I don't need to know I got 1,214,551 unique visitors. All analytic packages have problems like this. And by the way: I don't like Google Analytics, I think Plausible is a great step in the right direction, but this post is a poorly researched rant and should not be on HN.

notretarded 6y ago
Nice try Google employee
temp8964 6y ago
> Again, what!? I'm not seeing these prompts. Apparently it means prompts for privacy stuff.
hinkley 6y ago
Google analytics code is 19k, then it still has to do all the analytics.
harry8 6y ago
Come on dude, you gotta read like, the next sentence where it says these points are a summary of the details here: https://plausible.io/blog/remove-google-analytics#its-owned-by-google-the-largest-ad-tech-company-in-the-world https://plausible.io/blog/remove-google-analytics#its-owned-... eg "It uses cookies so you must obtain consent to store cookies" GDPR prompts. and "According to Google: “you must ensure that certain disclosures are given to, and consents obtained from, end users in the European Economic Area along with the UK. If you fail to comply with this policy, we may limit or suspend your use of the Google product and/or terminate your agreement”." Hyperlinking to more detail is a great thing to do when making an argument. If you're skeptical, follow the link and decide if it's really supporting evidence or you disagree. It's one way opinion writing can be vastly better in the age of hypertext than it was in the days of newsprint editorial. I'm absolutely in favour of this kind of thing! (Not a web guy, suspicious of goog, facebrick, but don't know enough to have a fully formed opinion on web analytics yet. Hyperlinked supported opinion is good.)
near 6y ago
> Its good to know you got 1M unique visitors last month, but I don't need to know I got 1,214,551 unique visitors. All analytic packages have problems like this. The numbers vary depending on the technical prowess of your audience. Probably at least half the visitors to my site would be using ad blockers. If one were to use server-side logging (at the HTTP request level), it would not be blockable, and your numbers would be accurate save for any bot spam inflating it.
stonogo 6y ago
Yes, let's. its 19KB, thats not awful. The payload is 19KB. Then the browser has to run all that code, continually, for the duration of the visit. This sucks terribly on underpowered android phones, which is the most common internet access device on earth. If you use Global Site Tag (as Google recommends) then it's more than twice as much code (and twice the GETs). But so what. So a small shop has better things to focus on, and obsessing over Google's idea of analytics isn't necessarily the top priority. That's what the whole article is about. Would be nice if if it offered specifics on the "liability" but it does not. Think of privacy as a limited resource: once you spend it, it's gone. In this case, you're spending your own privacy to get access to Google's dashboard. This could bite you in the ass if you ever found yourself at the negotiation table with a company that knows everything there is to know about your business. And that's just one issue -- you're also, of course, dumping all possible info about your users into Google's servers as well, and you're not even getting paid for it. And for the weight of an "extensive privacy policy", I'm not buying this as a great reason. You're not alone, but there are more people every day who do. You handwaving it away is fine but doesn't invalidate the point being made. Again, what!? I'm not seeing these prompts. Congratulations, I suppose! But why are you acting confused? The author provided a link explaining them. Which prompts pop up vary according to the laws of the region Google geolocates you in. Spend a few bucks on a European VPN if you want proof. I think your comment is the poorly researched rant. "What?" and "I'm not buying this" aren't sound arguments. You cherry-picked some bullet points, but ignored the citation provided, which expanded on every single one of them.

notretarded 6y ago

Nice try Google employee

temp8964 6y ago

> Again, what!? I'm not seeing these prompts. Apparently it means prompts for privacy stuff.

hinkley 6y ago

Google analytics code is 19k, then it still has to do all the analytics.

harry8 6y ago

Come on dude, you gotta read like, the next sentence where it says these points are a summary of the details here: https://plausible.io/blog/remove-google-analytics#its-owned-by-google-the-largest-ad-tech-company-in-the-world https://plausible.io/blog/remove-google-analytics#its-owned-... eg "It uses cookies so you must obtain consent to store cookies" GDPR prompts. and "According to Google: “you must ensure that certain disclosures are given to, and consents obtained from, end users in the European Economic Area along with the UK. If you fail to comply with this policy, we may limit or suspend your use of the Google product and/or terminate your agreement”." Hyperlinking to more detail is a great thing to do when making an argument. If you're skeptical, follow the link and decide if it's really supporting evidence or you disagree. It's one way opinion writing can be vastly better in the age of hypertext than it was in the days of newsprint editorial. I'm absolutely in favour of this kind of thing! (Not a web guy, suspicious of goog, facebrick, but don't know enough to have a fully formed opinion on web analytics yet. Hyperlinked supported opinion is good.)

near 6y ago

> Its good to know you got 1M unique visitors last month, but I don't need to know I got 1,214,551 unique visitors. All analytic packages have problems like this. The numbers vary depending on the technical prowess of your audience. Probably at least half the visitors to my site would be using ad blockers. If one were to use server-side logging (at the HTTP request level), it would not be blockable, and your numbers would be accurate save for any bot spam inflating it.

stonogo 6y ago

Yes, let's. its 19KB, thats not awful. The payload is 19KB. Then the browser has to run all that code, continually, for the duration of the visit. This sucks terribly on underpowered android phones, which is the most common internet access device on earth. If you use Global Site Tag (as Google recommends) then it's more than twice as much code (and twice the GETs). But so what. So a small shop has better things to focus on, and obsessing over Google's idea of analytics isn't necessarily the top priority. That's what the whole article is about. Would be nice if if it offered specifics on the "liability" but it does not. Think of privacy as a limited resource: once you spend it, it's gone. In this case, you're spending your own privacy to get access to Google's dashboard. This could bite you in the ass if you ever found yourself at the negotiation table with a company that knows everything there is to know about your business. And that's just one issue -- you're also, of course, dumping all possible info about your users into Google's servers as well, and you're not even getting paid for it. And for the weight of an "extensive privacy policy", I'm not buying this as a great reason. You're not alone, but there are more people every day who do. You handwaving it away is fine but doesn't invalidate the point being made. Again, what!? I'm not seeing these prompts. Congratulations, I suppose! But why are you acting confused? The author provided a link explaining them. Which prompts pop up vary according to the laws of the region Google geolocates you in. Spend a few bucks on a European VPN if you want proof. I think your comment is the poorly researched rant. "What?" and "I'm not buying this" aren't sound arguments. You cherry-picked some bullet points, but ignored the citation provided, which expanded on every single one of them.