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I don't mind blocking ads, but analytics? That seems like the taking the desire for privacy too far. Why shouldn't site owner know you've visited their site? H

I don't mind blocking ads, but analytics? That seems like the taking the desire for privacy too far. Why shouldn't site owner know you've visited their site? How will they do their job if they don't know where people come from, what content they enjoy, what devices they should optimized for, general demographic of their audience, etc. These are all the things a restourant owner would know about their customers, for example. But no one seems to have a problem with that.

jerrre 6y ago
Perhaps I'm old fashioned but I would not expect a restaurant owner to track where I come from, my demographics etc?
- jannes 6y ago
  They wouldn’t have to “track” it scientifically in a database. They would just know implicitly by observing their customers who are right in front of their eyes. (At least pre-covid)
  - Vhano 6y ago
    would they know which car I drive from looking at me?
- izacus 6y ago
  Restaurant owners do exactly that - just by looking at you sitting in there (and other customers).
  - Vhano 6y ago
    not my underwear colour, type, size. What they see is what I offer to show
cmod 6y ago
Less about stopping analytics and more about stopping privacy-malicious analytics (which google analytics could arguably be defined as). Install a privacy friendly analytics package and I suspect it won’t be much blocked.
- panta82 6y ago
  That'd be a reasonable counter-point if extensions like uBlock Origin weren't also blocking self-hosted analytics packages, like Matomo. I think people in general have gotten so sick of ad powered big tech they are having a bit of an over-reaction against analytics in general, not just google's product.
occz 6y ago
You can, as the owner of a site, check that someone has visited your site, but you cannot give that information to Google (without consent). That's illegal under the GDPR. Also, you have zero control of what code any client executes on their machine. Zero say, whatsoever.
- logifail 6y ago
  > That's illegal under the GDPR [..] So what about sites that claim that certain cookies are necessary for operation of the site, when that's at best bending the truth and at worst an outright falsehood? Many sites work perfectly well and - amusingly - become blazingly fast once you block all scripting and cookies. No annoying GDPR notices, no annoying ads, no (client-side) tracking. So much for "necessary" cookies :/
tomstuart 6y ago
The problem is with the centralisation and aggregation of that knowledge. It’s not (necessarily) bad that the site owner knows you’ve visited their site, it’s bad that Google knows all of the sites you’ve visited.
- panta82 6y ago
  That's a fair point. While I am not as concerned about big tech's data siloing as some, I can see why it's worrying. Unfortunately, not only is GA the best totally free analytics solution that any marketeer will know how to use, many ad blockers nuke ALL analytics scripts, even if they have nothing to do with google.
  - account42 6y ago
    > many ad blockers nuke ALL analytics scripts, even if they have nothing to do with google That's because you don't need analytics scripts to see if people visiit your site - you have the original page request for that. Analytics script collect additional information beyond that, which users that block them have deemed to be not acceptable.
jakobdabo 6y ago
JS analytics gives away too much. Web site owners can analyze their web server's log, which has at least client's IP address, user agent, timestamp and the URL. Already too much if you ask me.
grishka 6y ago
You could do all that without involving the world's largest advertising corporation. Use the data you already receive with each request. You know, count how many pages you've served, use a GeoIP database on visitors' IP addresses, parse their user agents, all that kind of stuff.
- panta82 6y ago
  A lot of relevant interactions in modern apps are client based. You'd have to send those data points via ajax, but then you've just recreated google analytics. Also, feels like a bit of an arbitrary boundary.
Griffinsauce 6y ago
Most of those things are easily analysed in-house or with much less invasive solutions than GA. > general demographic of their audience This is not useful to improve a product unless combined with proper research into the demo, which most people don't do. They just apply their own biases and make their product _worse_. So many people are making all their decisions based on shallow data like this and never do a simple usability test that yields massively more impact. Put differently, people use this data to try to focus in on specific traits of their audience before even testing that their software works for "humans".
logifail 6y ago
> These are all the things a restourant owner would know about their customers, for example The restaurant I visit most often "knows" only my first name (only) plus my mobile phone number, I suppose if they really tried they could probably collect data on my approximate height, build, eye and hair colour, and that I have multiple kids. That's it (since I pay them in cash). Oddly enough they don't worrying about tracking their customers and instead focus on delivering an excellent product with excellent service. They're known in the region for that, they're usually busy, so one might think their strategy seems to be working(?)
- panta82 6y ago
  They also know when you like to visit, what you like to order, how long you stay, who are you with... All together, that's more data than a Google Analytics user knows about any of their visitors.
mrweasel 6y ago
I’m mostly interested in what moves like this will mean for e-commerce. Not the sites themself, but all the shady and honestly unprofessionel retargetting, ad-agencies and online marketing in general. Most of those business rely on questionable JavaScript based tracking. I don’t see the majority of those business have the resources or knowledge to survive without JavaScript tracking.
tinus_hn 6y ago
Would it be reasonable for a restaurant to know about every other restaurant you visit? And every store you look at, and every newspaper article you read?
- panta82 6y ago
  As a user of google analytics, I don't know any of that.
  - tinus_hn 6y ago
    But you do! There’s a ‘Interests’ profile of your visitors in the stats, which is based on what they do on other sites. Of course in any case Google knows and they choose how much they want to tell you.
    - panta82 6y ago
      Fair point. I am not a heavy GA user, I just use the basic functionality. Nevertheless, I don't feel iffy about my Interests profile participating in aggregate data available to the sites I visit. Since virtually all sites are free of charge, giving some of that insight back seems like a fair trade. That said, having ALL that data available to Google without anonymization is a bit more worrying, although I haven't seen many examples where it hurt someone in real world.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
Vhano 6y ago
best to ask. Do you generally advertise your ethnicity/country when you go to a restaurant?
matsemann 6y ago
They know I visited the page by their servers serving me the page. Why the hell does Google need to be involved for that? And why should a random page I visit get to know my demography, interests and where I come from? How can you portray avoiding that as taking privacy too far?? I don't care if that makes it harder to optimize your business. Find another way or perish.
- panta82 6y ago
  But these are all things that real world business can learn as well about you, more or less. You don't have a problem with them knowing that.
  - matsemann 6y ago
    How do the real life businesses know that? If I explicitly tell them, that's fine. If they know it through some nefarious collection I would have a problem with that.
XCSme 6y ago
You can still self-host your web analytics and they won't be blocked, plus it's 100x better than using a "free" service that centralizes data.
- panta82 6y ago
  I am not deep into analytics space, but I know from experience that the most popular ad blocker (ublock origin) will block the most popular self hosted analytics package (matomo).
  - XCSme 6y ago
    The thing about blocking self-hosted analytics is that it's very easy to avoid being blocked if you want. You can just change the included tracker name, or request parameter names.

jerrre 6y ago

Perhaps I'm old fashioned but I would not expect a restaurant owner to track where I come from, my demographics etc?

jannes 6y ago
They wouldn’t have to “track” it scientifically in a database. They would just know implicitly by observing their customers who are right in front of their eyes. (At least pre-covid)
- Vhano 6y ago
  would they know which car I drive from looking at me?
izacus 6y ago
Restaurant owners do exactly that - just by looking at you sitting in there (and other customers).
- Vhano 6y ago
  not my underwear colour, type, size. What they see is what I offer to show

cmod 6y ago

Less about stopping analytics and more about stopping privacy-malicious analytics (which google analytics could arguably be defined as). Install a privacy friendly analytics package and I suspect it won’t be much blocked.

panta82 6y ago
That'd be a reasonable counter-point if extensions like uBlock Origin weren't also blocking self-hosted analytics packages, like Matomo. I think people in general have gotten so sick of ad powered big tech they are having a bit of an over-reaction against analytics in general, not just google's product.

occz 6y ago

You can, as the owner of a site, check that someone has visited your site, but you cannot give that information to Google (without consent). That's illegal under the GDPR. Also, you have zero control of what code any client executes on their machine. Zero say, whatsoever.

logifail 6y ago
> That's illegal under the GDPR [..] So what about sites that claim that certain cookies are necessary for operation of the site, when that's at best bending the truth and at worst an outright falsehood? Many sites work perfectly well and - amusingly - become blazingly fast once you block all scripting and cookies. No annoying GDPR notices, no annoying ads, no (client-side) tracking. So much for "necessary" cookies :/

tomstuart 6y ago

The problem is with the centralisation and aggregation of that knowledge. It’s not (necessarily) bad that the site owner knows you’ve visited their site, it’s bad that Google knows all of the sites you’ve visited.

panta82 6y ago
That's a fair point. While I am not as concerned about big tech's data siloing as some, I can see why it's worrying. Unfortunately, not only is GA the best totally free analytics solution that any marketeer will know how to use, many ad blockers nuke ALL analytics scripts, even if they have nothing to do with google.
- account42 6y ago
  > many ad blockers nuke ALL analytics scripts, even if they have nothing to do with google That's because you don't need analytics scripts to see if people visiit your site - you have the original page request for that. Analytics script collect additional information beyond that, which users that block them have deemed to be not acceptable.

jakobdabo 6y ago

JS analytics gives away too much. Web site owners can analyze their web server's log, which has at least client's IP address, user agent, timestamp and the URL. Already too much if you ask me.

grishka 6y ago

You could do all that without involving the world's largest advertising corporation. Use the data you already receive with each request. You know, count how many pages you've served, use a GeoIP database on visitors' IP addresses, parse their user agents, all that kind of stuff.

panta82 6y ago
A lot of relevant interactions in modern apps are client based. You'd have to send those data points via ajax, but then you've just recreated google analytics. Also, feels like a bit of an arbitrary boundary.

Griffinsauce 6y ago

Most of those things are easily analysed in-house or with much less invasive solutions than GA. > general demographic of their audience This is not useful to improve a product unless combined with proper research into the demo, which most people don't do. They just apply their own biases and make their product _worse_. So many people are making all their decisions based on shallow data like this and never do a simple usability test that yields massively more impact. Put differently, people use this data to try to focus in on specific traits of their audience before even testing that their software works for "humans".

logifail 6y ago

> These are all the things a restourant owner would know about their customers, for example The restaurant I visit most often "knows" only my first name (only) plus my mobile phone number, I suppose if they really tried they could probably collect data on my approximate height, build, eye and hair colour, and that I have multiple kids. That's it (since I pay them in cash). Oddly enough they don't worrying about tracking their customers and instead focus on delivering an excellent product with excellent service. They're known in the region for that, they're usually busy, so one might think their strategy seems to be working(?)

panta82 6y ago
They also know when you like to visit, what you like to order, how long you stay, who are you with... All together, that's more data than a Google Analytics user knows about any of their visitors.

mrweasel 6y ago

I’m mostly interested in what moves like this will mean for e-commerce. Not the sites themself, but all the shady and honestly unprofessionel retargetting, ad-agencies and online marketing in general. Most of those business rely on questionable JavaScript based tracking. I don’t see the majority of those business have the resources or knowledge to survive without JavaScript tracking.

tinus_hn 6y ago

Would it be reasonable for a restaurant to know about every other restaurant you visit? And every store you look at, and every newspaper article you read?

panta82 6y ago
As a user of google analytics, I don't know any of that.
- tinus_hn 6y ago
  But you do! There’s a ‘Interests’ profile of your visitors in the stats, which is based on what they do on other sites. Of course in any case Google knows and they choose how much they want to tell you.
  - panta82 6y ago
    Fair point. I am not a heavy GA user, I just use the basic functionality. Nevertheless, I don't feel iffy about my Interests profile participating in aggregate data available to the sites I visit. Since virtually all sites are free of charge, giving some of that insight back seems like a fair trade. That said, having ALL that data available to Google without anonymization is a bit more worrying, although I haven't seen many examples where it hurt someone in real world.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

Vhano 6y ago

best to ask. Do you generally advertise your ethnicity/country when you go to a restaurant?

matsemann 6y ago

They know I visited the page by their servers serving me the page. Why the hell does Google need to be involved for that? And why should a random page I visit get to know my demography, interests and where I come from? How can you portray avoiding that as taking privacy too far?? I don't care if that makes it harder to optimize your business. Find another way or perish.

panta82 6y ago
But these are all things that real world business can learn as well about you, more or less. You don't have a problem with them knowing that.
- matsemann 6y ago
  How do the real life businesses know that? If I explicitly tell them, that's fine. If they know it through some nefarious collection I would have a problem with that.

XCSme 6y ago

You can still self-host your web analytics and they won't be blocked, plus it's 100x better than using a "free" service that centralizes data.

panta82 6y ago
I am not deep into analytics space, but I know from experience that the most popular ad blocker (ublock origin) will block the most popular self hosted analytics package (matomo).
- XCSme 6y ago
  The thing about blocking self-hosted analytics is that it's very easy to avoid being blocked if you want. You can just change the included tracker name, or request parameter names.