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I dislike Google and their products pretty much universally, but having this sort of thing done by a competitor is not just distasteful, I see it as verging on

I dislike Google and their products pretty much universally, but having this sort of thing done by a competitor is not just distasteful, I see it as verging on corporatism. Make a better product and beat them, don't use the fact that a government is banning them to upsell your own tracking software. All tracking is bad, from Google or not. I understand the "companies need to make informed decisions" argument but I disagree with it, mainly because tracking software is involuntary and it's in the interest of the tracking software maker and the company using it to make it as stealthy as possible. PS: What adds salt to injury is that you're using Google Fonts on this website. If you were privacy-conscious, you'd self-host at least. Read here: https://developers.google.com/fonts/faq?hl=en#what_does_using_the_google_fonts_api_mean_for_the_privacy_of_my_users https://developers.google.com/fonts/faq?hl=en#what_does_usin...

franklampard 5y ago
Isn’t a legal product a better one than an illegal counterpart?
- amelius 5y ago
  Nope. It's because the illegal product has lower cost (because complying to regulations costs money one way or the other).
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - IanCal 5y ago
    It may not be cheaper when you have to deal with the repercussions of breaking the law though.
    - amelius 5y ago
      Those are usually just slaps on the wrist.
  - whimsicalism 5y ago
    Sure, if the products and companies are identical in every other fashion, which is never true in real life.
    - amelius 5y ago
      Are you suggesting that legal products/services always win over illegal products in a capitalist market? Think again: Uber, AirBnb, etc.
      - whimsicalism 5y ago
        No, you are the one claiming that illegal products are always cheaper. I am saying it is murky.
        amelius 5y ago
        The question was about otherwise identical products.
- kerng 5y ago
  Only if the user (in Google's case the product) would be the one liable.
nyellin 5y ago
Agreed. We've thought of trying out PostHog in our open source platform for Kubernetes and this is a bit of a turn off. We'll probably try it anyway, to be honest, but I'm not crazy about this type of advertising. There is so much room to beat Google Analytics on UX alone. Is this really necessary?
- tokai 5y ago
  That your competitors product is illegal is an excellent point to showcase for potential users. We're not even talking real mudslinging, just pointing out reality. Being offended over this is baffling to me.
  - deleted 5y ago
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  - deleted 5y ago
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  - saimiam 5y ago
    Yeah, fight with whatever tool you have including going negative. I don’t for a second think Google would hold back if their own behemoth was in under mortal threat and their main competitor had been found guilty of illegal acts. The invisible hand of the market (fwiw) relies on free flow of information. Educating the public about Google’s illegal acts is an act of service, though self serving.
    - yessirwhatever 5y ago
      Allowing yourself to engage in immoral/shady activity just because your competitor is doing it actually helps your competitor by legitimizing their methods, it's an endless cycle of "but they did it first".
      - saimiam 5y ago
        How’s it immoral to make sure the public knows that a product they are planning to use has been declared illegal in a certain jurisdiction? In fact, given the state of regulatory capture, it’s a public service to educate consumers locally about how a competitor’s actions are perceived abroad.
deleted 5y ago
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jsiepkes 5y ago
> Make a better product and beat them, It's going to be hard when your own hands are tied by legislation but your competitor just does as they see fit. Also them having the resources to drag out any court ruling for years and years ensures there is no level playing field whatsoever. So yeah, maybe companies should be called out for thinking they are above the law just because they can afford endless legal battles.
- moron4hire 5y ago
  - corywatilo 5y ago
    Sadly not supported by TailwindCSS!
- usbqk 5y ago
  Google analytics is against the law because they are American which means that they have to give up any data the us government asks of them. That’s the only illegal thing they do, and they are not better just for being American. They are better because they are better.
  - dylan604 5y ago
    There is so much wrong with this. There are legal processes for the US gov't to request that data legally. Any other means of obtaining that data is illegal even if it is done by an entity within the gov't. This isn't the CCP. Google Analytics isn't better at anything other than their marketing has convinced everyone that it is a must have. If you believe 100% of the data from GA is accurate, then I have a bridge to sell you.
    - trasz 5y ago
      Some of those "legal processes" involve secret kangaroo "security courts". It's not really any different from CCP in that regard.
deepstack 5y ago
>PS: What adds salt to injury is that you're using Google Fonts on this website. If you were privacy-conscious, you'd self-host at least. Read here: https://developers.google.com/fonts/faq?hl=en#what_does_usin https://developers.google.com/fonts/faq?hl=en#what_does_usin... Thanks for pointing that. Don't know how many time have met privacy advocates, etc has made a such a strong point against google, and still embedded youtube video or google font on their site. Is there are github page where one can block all google or fb used domains or ips? Would be very useful!
- samhw 5y ago
  > Is there are github page where one can block all google or fb used domains or ips? Are you asking for a repo - for software? Or instructions? Or something to do with GitHub Pages? I may be able to help, but I don't quite follow.
  - filoleg 5y ago
    I believe they are looking for something like PiHole, but a fully software solution. Not sure whether they are looking to go the open-router-firmware route or the route of some ublockOrigin config though.
    - andai 5y ago
      Maybe just a hosts file? Though that only works for domain names, not IPs, and in my experience Chrome (-based browsers) bypasses it somehow.
- dylan604 5y ago
  Seems like you're looking for a browser extension. Something like uBlock, NoScript, etc will all do the blocking of the evils
- yessirwhatever 5y ago
  You can use Privacy Badger by EFF https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/privacy-badger17/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/privacy-badge... Edit: Please note that they seem to have removed the link to Google fonts from the website now.
5evOX5hTZ9mYa9E 5y ago
How do you compete fairly with somebody that engages in monopoly abuse and anti-competitive behaviour? It has been more than 3 and a half years since GDPR was implemented, yet it took concentrated efforts of non-profits and individuals to come to this extremely obvious interpretation that EU–US Privacy Shield is nonsense. Maybe if EU and member countries actually made any enforcement efforts, a viable competitive space would emerge.
hotgeart 5y ago
This will help you: https://google-webfonts-helper.herokuapp.com/fonts https://google-webfonts-helper.herokuapp.com/fonts
dmix 5y ago
Even the quote on their homepage is made me roll my eyes > PostHog is what I always wanted a Product Analytics SaaS to be. Private cloud option so GDPR becomes way more manageable, features built based on direct community feedback, focus on simplicity and usefulness over vanity features...Great job people! Mmm I dream of [Private cloud options] to make [needlessly complicated government legislation] easy! Yay privacy, I guess? Just add 3 more needlessly complicated middlemen.
judge2020 5y ago
> If you were privacy-conscious, you'd self-host at least. Read here: That page explicitly notes that cookies aren't sent and these requests aren't used for the ad machine. Is using Google Fonts at all the issue just on the chance they're using IP address matching for ads/is them having your IP too much of a risk?
- kerng 5y ago
  Interesting, I have always assumed that Google and FB would use any request sent to them for tracking and profile building. Probably a safe assumption to be honest. Just dump all request logs in a giant Data Lake - seems like promotion material idea. (sarcasm).
- morelisp 5y ago
  > cookies aren't sent Yes, it says this. > aren't used for the ad machine No, it doesn't say this.
geysersam 5y ago
Unless the message is misleading I don't understand why you would find it distasteful. As mentioned elsewhere in the thread, a competing product being illegal is an excellent selling point. Why would you withold that important information from your customers?
- Meph504 5y ago
  The thing is, that site is misleading, a product that is legal in pretty much the whole world (currently) but against the law in two countries, does not make the product illegal anywhere else, and it seems more likely that the fault would be on the companies implementing it in those countries, not in the global service that is being provided. Then again, even though this is google, I'm not big on localized countries attempt to create laws that dictate the behavior of the internet as a whole, admittedly this is a different issue.
  - geysersam 5y ago
    The website does not say Google analytics is illegal everywhere in the world. Only that it might be in parts of Europe. I don't think this is insignificant enough to be considered misleading.
    - Meph504 5y ago
      Its 2 countries, based on the site (which honestly seems low) I would say its pretty insignificant to be anything but an ad.
      - morelisp 5y ago
        It's against the law in many countries (any EU countries, and therefore also likely the UK) but only tested in court in two countries.
- mitchdoogle 5y ago
  This whole post and the website is totally misleading. It's marketing disguised as a helpful tool.
judge2020 5y ago
To add, it might not even be illegal; the Netherlands quote is: > The Dutch Data Protection Authority warns that the use of Google Analytics 'may soon no longer be allowed', after a ruling by the Austrian privacy regulator. A definitive conclusion is said to come at the beginning of 2022. As for the Astria ruling, this is part of it: > The fact that Google LLC argued that Google Analytics was allegedly provided by Google Ireland Ltd since April 2021 was not considered relevant, as the violation occurred in August 2020. So it might be illegal to have used GA before April 2021, but it very well might now be legal given that GA is now provided by 'Google Ireland Ltd', which was a move explicitly done by Google to comply with GDPR.
slothtrop 5y ago
> don't use the fact that a government is banning them to upsell your own tracking software. This isn't very convincing.
dannyw 5y ago
- Meph504 5y ago
  If Company B is doing the same thing, but not known by name, yes.
  - kelseyfrog 5y ago
    Distasteful sure, but why would a company let distaste stand in the way of profit? This is corporate realpolitik. The only bad move is to leave opportunity on the table.
- stickfigure 5y ago
  - remram 5y ago
    Godwin's law says "someone will invoke a comparison to the Nazis". You fell to it, not GP.
- Permit 5y ago
  The linked page is closer to https://lobste.rs https://lobste.rs (or maybe ProductHunt) hosting a scary-looking webpage with the words "Hacker News is Illegal" on the front of it. Why? Because Hacker News does not indicate that the login cookie provided to you with be persistent. From: https://ec.europa.eu/justice/article-29/documentation/opinion-recommendation/files/2012/wp194_en.pdf https://ec.europa.eu/justice/article-29/documentation/opinio... > Persistent login cookies which store an authentication token across browser sessions are not exempted under CRITERION B. This is an important distinction because the user may not be immediately aware of the fact that closing the browser will not clear their authentication settings. They may return to the website under the assumption that they are anonymous whilst in fact they are still logged in to the service. The commonly seen method of using a checkbox and a simple information note such as “remember me (uses cookies)” next to the submit form would be an appropriate means of gaining consent therefore negating the need to apply an exemption in this case. I think this situation is much closer to what's going on in the original post. No one's life is threatened, but the letter of the law has been broken. Would it be tasteful to put up such a site?
mcdonje 5y ago
Matomo makes the same case, but in a much more tasteful way: https://matomo.org/google-analytics-alternative/ https://matomo.org/google-analytics-alternative/
- rapnie 5y ago
  Here's the comparison of Plausible Analytics: https://plausible.io/vs-google-analytics https://plausible.io/vs-google-analytics
  - mcdonje 5y ago
    Also well done.
mitchdoogle 5y ago
This kind of marketing is pretty common on HN. Provocative title and a blog post (written as if they're an independent observer) that presents a 'problem' and conveniently their product is perfect for solving it. The worst is these things get tons of upvotes.
- dylan604 5y ago
  The readers of HN are human after all, unless you're all bots and I'm the last human. Oh gawd, what if I'm not human either. Oh crap, now I'm going to be fretting over that all day. If you see a title, you have no idea it is from a 1st party or 3rd party until you read the article. Or, you could just come to the comments an diatribe away. That's the internet way, and claiming to be morally better than the internet is the HN way.
  - djrogers 5y ago
    > unless you're all bots and I'm the last human Checks out - I'm a bot.
  - mitchdoogle 5y ago
    As they say, a sucker is born every minute
- BlueTemplar 5y ago
  At least, unlike for the overwhelming majority of articles, the title is by the author himself.
foxfluff 5y ago
> I dislike Google and their products pretty much universally, but having this sort of thing done by a competitor is not just distasteful, I see it as verging on corporatism. Don't shoot the messenger? I think everyone should have the right to voice opinions and point out problems with products, competitors or not. As long as the claims are factual and not FUD and bullshit. (I'm reminded of fud campaigns made e.g. by big corporations against open source, backed by their own shady fudfactory studies) If a company can -- without lying or twisting facts -- point out that their competitor's product is dangerous/illegal/unsuitable/{whatever is relevant to me}, I'm all open. Of course, the line between a fud campaign and plain good old information is sometimes very thin.
throwhauser 5y ago
If it pushes all companies to be clear about their potential GDPR issues, I'm all for it. Let them compete on ease of compliance. As it is, it's very difficult to tell if something you're using is gathering data that you don't intend to gather (e.g. your hosting provider logging IP addresses for your hand-coded blogging software). I don't want to have even the tiniest possibility of being on the receiving end of one of those theoretically huge GDPR fines just by self-publishing some code and putting it on the internet.
Sebb767 5y ago
> Make a better product and beat them, don't use the fact that a government is banning them to upsell your own tracking software. I love that you casually put not being illegal on the same level as a dashboard or a convenience feature.
Volker_W 5y ago
> Make a better product Their product is open source and (assuming the say the truth) keeps the data on the server of the website owner. I would say this is better.
tehwebguy 5y ago
Using Google Fonts on this is hilarious and bad, otherwise though this post makes no sense. Pointing out your competitors flaws is part of competition and, I’d guess, an important driver for fixing or eliminating those flaws market wide.
KronisLV 5y ago
> PS: What adds salt to injury is that you're using Google Fonts on this website. If you were privacy-conscious, you'd self-host at least. I get what you're saying, but i feel like that's probably a sliding scale of how much people actually care about these things vs how much they want to just easily get things done. For example, right now my personal website serves the following files, just to get Open Sans working: /fonts/open-sans-latin.woff2 /fonts/open-sans-latin-ext.woff2 /fonts/open-sans-latin-bold.woff2 /fonts/open-sans-latin-ext-bold.woff2 What's the CSS for displaying just one of those fonts? It's the following: /* latin */ @font-face { font-family: 'Open Sans'; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; font-display: swap; src: local('Open Sans'), url(/fonts/open-sans-latin.woff2) format('woff2'); unicode-range: U+0000-00FF, U+0131, U+0152-0153, U+02BB-02BC, U+02C6, U+02DA, U+02DC, U+2000-206F, U+2074, U+20AC, U+2122, U+2191, U+2193, U+2212, U+2215, U+FEFF, U+FFFD; } Of course, depending on the browsers that you want to support and how efficient you want things to be, you might end up using more than just the WOFF2 format or just adding a TTF font and calling it a day, which will further inflate the amount of configuration that you need. Furthermore, the characters that you'll want to show on your site will also make you write more code, just look at what Google does for Open Sans: https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=Open+Sans&display=swap https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=Open+Sans&display=s... Oh, and more styles? Well, be ready to add all of those as well, since most of the fonts out there won't necessarily be variable: https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Open+Sans#standard-styles https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Open+Sans#standard-styles In comparison, Google Fonts just lets you choose what you want and copy something like the following: HTML: <link rel="preconnect" href="https://fonts.googleapis.com"> <link rel="preconnect" href="https://fonts.gstatic.com" crossorigin> <link href="https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=Open+Sans:wght@400;700&display=swap" rel="stylesheet"> CSS: font-family: 'Open Sans', sans-serif; While we're on the topic of fonts, it's a shame that we don't think more about how heavy the fonts we choose to use are, since right now serving my own fonts eats up around half of the bandwidth on my non-image-heavy site. The single article that i've found on the topic so far as been this, "Smallest (file size) Google Web Fonts": http://www.oxfordshireweb.com/smallest-file-size-google-web-fonts/ http://www.oxfordshireweb.com/smallest-file-size-google-web-... In my opinion, those sizes should also be readily available in the web UI of Google Fonts, or most other sites that recommend fonts out there!
woah 5y ago
This is a bad take. The problem with Google analytics is that it allows Google to surveil everyone's movements around the entire internet. This is enabled by the fact that for a long time, Google analytics was the best analytics product and it is free. I've been in the position myself with personal project websites of trying to decide whether I'm just not going to know anything about what my users are doing, whether I'm going to try to hook up some janky open source alternative, or whether I'm going to give in to the surveillance machine. The competitor that put up this site appears to be a company that provides analytics that are not centrally collected and analyzed to serve ads across the internet. Their entire selling point seems to be that they do not engage in mass surveillance. Equating this to what Google analytics does (if this competitor's claims are accurate) is a false equivalency. To me, this is no more objectionable than a foam insulation manufacturer capitalizing on asbestos bans.
- hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
  Totally agree. I really don't have any objections to analytics that are run solely by the website provider, as long as those analytics are only used to investigate usage and issues on that website. I don't have any problem with coffeegrinders.com knowing all about how I use their site to find good coffee grinders, but I DON'T want that correlated with my choice of mildly NSFW Tumbler videos. It's pretty inherent to the way the web works in any case, where you're not just being broadcasted to but are having a back-and-forth conversation with the website. The primary problem with surveillance capitalism is when your movement across the entire Internet is gobbled up, sliced, and aggregated for the largest bidder.
  - whimsicalism 5y ago
    What about a social media service recommending you advertisements solely based off of analytics derived from your actions on that website?
    - hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
      I don't have objections to that, similar to how I don't have objections to a search engine showing me ads solely based on what I've typed in to the search engine. Indeed, I really feel that Google and Facebook turned "evil" (whatever that means) when the huge amount of customer data available to them from their own sites was no longer enough, but they demanded on vacuuming up your actions on every single corner of the Internet to add to their already gargantuan piles of dough.
pyrale 5y ago
> Make a better product and beat them It's really hard to make that claim when Google is known for anticompetitive behaviour, including crippling GA competitors [1]. We should probably acknowledge that Google is in the terminal phase where only forced split and divesture will help, and in the meantime, every action from competitors is fair game. [1]: https://forum.matomo.org/t/adwords-campaign-rejected-for-google-matomo-javascript-is-a-malware/35131/8 https://forum.matomo.org/t/adwords-campaign-rejected-for-goo... https://matomo.org/faq/troubleshooting/antivirus-program-or-malware-checker-or-google-ads-claim-that-matomo-js-or-piwik-js-are-malware-what-can-i-do/ https://matomo.org/faq/troubleshooting/antivirus-program-or-...
axiosgunnar 5y ago
If their product does not violate the GDPR, their product is a better product. It's just that website creators were defaulting to "just use Google Analytics" because it's convenient and they didn't care about their user's human right to privacy, and were thus externalizing human rights violations onto them. The government is simply preventing externalization of harm, which even libertarians will agree if the governments job (of course agreeing on what level of spying is harmful is where the debate will be).
StreamBright 5y ago
How exactly you propose of doing that? I cannot convince frontend devs to not use Google fonts directly and upload it to their own CDN.
belorn 5y ago
In industries that successfully self-regulate we find that good products that follow regulations out compete those that don't. In those cases politicians also tend to avoid adding regulations in order to not disrupt a working system. In industries that don't successfully self-regulate we get politicians that force a regulation in order to have good product out compete bad ones. It is especially common with lemon markets where information asymmetry between buyers and sellers is a significant reason of good products being unable to fairly compete with bad ones. The value of personal information is a notoriously lemon market where the buyer, ie users, are not aware of the actually cost to themselves or to whom they are selling their information. One of the first requirements in GDPR is fixing part of this by forcing companies to disclose to whom the information is sent to. Secondly it partially address the cost aspect by forcing companies to disclose how the information get used and thus what the real cost to the user is. A bit like how banks need to disclose what the interest of a loan actually will be before the consumer signs the contract. What makes privacy issues an even bigger issue is that the cost is not carried by the party who decide and benefits from the choice of analytic software. This is similar to environmental issues where the cost of a decision is not carried by the company that made it, but rather by those around them. Environmental issues is a typical example where self-regulations do not seem to work, as the end consumer has no information if a certain clothing item is made from child labor or by a eco friendly operation. A regulations job there is to put down some minimum standards that everyone need to follow, including information disclosure so that end users can actually know what they are paying for and how much.
boomlinde 5y ago
What is corporatism in the sense that this is verging on it? > Make a better product and beat them, don't use the fact that a government is banning them to upsell your own tracking software. Google Analytics is not a good product if it can't legally be used. The competitor in this case is offering a better product because it can legally be used.

franklampard 5y ago

Isn’t a legal product a better one than an illegal counterpart?

amelius 5y ago
Nope. It's because the illegal product has lower cost (because complying to regulations costs money one way or the other).
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- IanCal 5y ago
  It may not be cheaper when you have to deal with the repercussions of breaking the law though.
  - amelius 5y ago
    Those are usually just slaps on the wrist.
- whimsicalism 5y ago
  Sure, if the products and companies are identical in every other fashion, which is never true in real life.
  - amelius 5y ago
    Are you suggesting that legal products/services always win over illegal products in a capitalist market? Think again: Uber, AirBnb, etc.
    - whimsicalism 5y ago
      No, you are the one claiming that illegal products are always cheaper. I am saying it is murky.
      - amelius 5y ago
        The question was about otherwise identical products.
kerng 5y ago
Only if the user (in Google's case the product) would be the one liable.

nyellin 5y ago

Agreed. We've thought of trying out PostHog in our open source platform for Kubernetes and this is a bit of a turn off. We'll probably try it anyway, to be honest, but I'm not crazy about this type of advertising. There is so much room to beat Google Analytics on UX alone. Is this really necessary?

tokai 5y ago
That your competitors product is illegal is an excellent point to showcase for potential users. We're not even talking real mudslinging, just pointing out reality. Being offended over this is baffling to me.
- deleted 5y ago
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- deleted 5y ago
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- saimiam 5y ago
  Yeah, fight with whatever tool you have including going negative. I don’t for a second think Google would hold back if their own behemoth was in under mortal threat and their main competitor had been found guilty of illegal acts. The invisible hand of the market (fwiw) relies on free flow of information. Educating the public about Google’s illegal acts is an act of service, though self serving.
  - yessirwhatever 5y ago
    Allowing yourself to engage in immoral/shady activity just because your competitor is doing it actually helps your competitor by legitimizing their methods, it's an endless cycle of "but they did it first".
    - saimiam 5y ago
      How’s it immoral to make sure the public knows that a product they are planning to use has been declared illegal in a certain jurisdiction? In fact, given the state of regulatory capture, it’s a public service to educate consumers locally about how a competitor’s actions are perceived abroad.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

jsiepkes 5y ago

> Make a better product and beat them, It's going to be hard when your own hands are tied by legislation but your competitor just does as they see fit. Also them having the resources to drag out any court ruling for years and years ensures there is no level playing field whatsoever. So yeah, maybe companies should be called out for thinking they are above the law just because they can afford endless legal battles.

moron4hire 5y ago
- corywatilo 5y ago
  Sadly not supported by TailwindCSS!
usbqk 5y ago
Google analytics is against the law because they are American which means that they have to give up any data the us government asks of them. That’s the only illegal thing they do, and they are not better just for being American. They are better because they are better.
- dylan604 5y ago
  There is so much wrong with this. There are legal processes for the US gov't to request that data legally. Any other means of obtaining that data is illegal even if it is done by an entity within the gov't. This isn't the CCP. Google Analytics isn't better at anything other than their marketing has convinced everyone that it is a must have. If you believe 100% of the data from GA is accurate, then I have a bridge to sell you.
  - trasz 5y ago
    Some of those "legal processes" involve secret kangaroo "security courts". It's not really any different from CCP in that regard.

deepstack 5y ago

>PS: What adds salt to injury is that you're using Google Fonts on this website. If you were privacy-conscious, you'd self-host at least. Read here: https://developers.google.com/fonts/faq?hl=en#what_does_usin https://developers.google.com/fonts/faq?hl=en#what_does_usin... Thanks for pointing that. Don't know how many time have met privacy advocates, etc has made a such a strong point against google, and still embedded youtube video or google font on their site. Is there are github page where one can block all google or fb used domains or ips? Would be very useful!

samhw 5y ago
> Is there are github page where one can block all google or fb used domains or ips? Are you asking for a repo - for software? Or instructions? Or something to do with GitHub Pages? I may be able to help, but I don't quite follow.
- filoleg 5y ago
  I believe they are looking for something like PiHole, but a fully software solution. Not sure whether they are looking to go the open-router-firmware route or the route of some ublockOrigin config though.
  - andai 5y ago
    Maybe just a hosts file? Though that only works for domain names, not IPs, and in my experience Chrome (-based browsers) bypasses it somehow.
dylan604 5y ago
Seems like you're looking for a browser extension. Something like uBlock, NoScript, etc will all do the blocking of the evils
yessirwhatever 5y ago
You can use Privacy Badger by EFF https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/privacy-badger17/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/privacy-badge... Edit: Please note that they seem to have removed the link to Google fonts from the website now.

5evOX5hTZ9mYa9E 5y ago

How do you compete fairly with somebody that engages in monopoly abuse and anti-competitive behaviour? It has been more than 3 and a half years since GDPR was implemented, yet it took concentrated efforts of non-profits and individuals to come to this extremely obvious interpretation that EU–US Privacy Shield is nonsense. Maybe if EU and member countries actually made any enforcement efforts, a viable competitive space would emerge.

hotgeart 5y ago

This will help you: https://google-webfonts-helper.herokuapp.com/fonts https://google-webfonts-helper.herokuapp.com/fonts

dmix 5y ago

Even the quote on their homepage is made me roll my eyes > PostHog is what I always wanted a Product Analytics SaaS to be. Private cloud option so GDPR becomes way more manageable, features built based on direct community feedback, focus on simplicity and usefulness over vanity features...Great job people! Mmm I dream of [Private cloud options] to make [needlessly complicated government legislation] easy! Yay privacy, I guess? Just add 3 more needlessly complicated middlemen.

judge2020 5y ago

> If you were privacy-conscious, you'd self-host at least. Read here: That page explicitly notes that cookies aren't sent and these requests aren't used for the ad machine. Is using Google Fonts at all the issue just on the chance they're using IP address matching for ads/is them having your IP too much of a risk?

kerng 5y ago
Interesting, I have always assumed that Google and FB would use any request sent to them for tracking and profile building. Probably a safe assumption to be honest. Just dump all request logs in a giant Data Lake - seems like promotion material idea. (sarcasm).
morelisp 5y ago
> cookies aren't sent Yes, it says this. > aren't used for the ad machine No, it doesn't say this.

geysersam 5y ago

Unless the message is misleading I don't understand why you would find it distasteful. As mentioned elsewhere in the thread, a competing product being illegal is an excellent selling point. Why would you withold that important information from your customers?

Meph504 5y ago
The thing is, that site is misleading, a product that is legal in pretty much the whole world (currently) but against the law in two countries, does not make the product illegal anywhere else, and it seems more likely that the fault would be on the companies implementing it in those countries, not in the global service that is being provided. Then again, even though this is google, I'm not big on localized countries attempt to create laws that dictate the behavior of the internet as a whole, admittedly this is a different issue.
- geysersam 5y ago
  The website does not say Google analytics is illegal everywhere in the world. Only that it might be in parts of Europe. I don't think this is insignificant enough to be considered misleading.
  - Meph504 5y ago
    Its 2 countries, based on the site (which honestly seems low) I would say its pretty insignificant to be anything but an ad.
    - morelisp 5y ago
      It's against the law in many countries (any EU countries, and therefore also likely the UK) but only tested in court in two countries.
mitchdoogle 5y ago
This whole post and the website is totally misleading. It's marketing disguised as a helpful tool.

judge2020 5y ago

To add, it might not even be illegal; the Netherlands quote is: > The Dutch Data Protection Authority warns that the use of Google Analytics 'may soon no longer be allowed', after a ruling by the Austrian privacy regulator. A definitive conclusion is said to come at the beginning of 2022. As for the Astria ruling, this is part of it: > The fact that Google LLC argued that Google Analytics was allegedly provided by Google Ireland Ltd since April 2021 was not considered relevant, as the violation occurred in August 2020. So it might be illegal to have used GA before April 2021, but it very well might now be legal given that GA is now provided by 'Google Ireland Ltd', which was a move explicitly done by Google to comply with GDPR.

slothtrop 5y ago

> don't use the fact that a government is banning them to upsell your own tracking software. This isn't very convincing.

dannyw 5y ago

Meph504 5y ago
If Company B is doing the same thing, but not known by name, yes.
- kelseyfrog 5y ago
  Distasteful sure, but why would a company let distaste stand in the way of profit? This is corporate realpolitik. The only bad move is to leave opportunity on the table.
stickfigure 5y ago
- remram 5y ago
  Godwin's law says "someone will invoke a comparison to the Nazis". You fell to it, not GP.
Permit 5y ago
The linked page is closer to https://lobste.rs https://lobste.rs (or maybe ProductHunt) hosting a scary-looking webpage with the words "Hacker News is Illegal" on the front of it. Why? Because Hacker News does not indicate that the login cookie provided to you with be persistent. From: https://ec.europa.eu/justice/article-29/documentation/opinion-recommendation/files/2012/wp194_en.pdf https://ec.europa.eu/justice/article-29/documentation/opinio... > Persistent login cookies which store an authentication token across browser sessions are not exempted under CRITERION B. This is an important distinction because the user may not be immediately aware of the fact that closing the browser will not clear their authentication settings. They may return to the website under the assumption that they are anonymous whilst in fact they are still logged in to the service. The commonly seen method of using a checkbox and a simple information note such as “remember me (uses cookies)” next to the submit form would be an appropriate means of gaining consent therefore negating the need to apply an exemption in this case. I think this situation is much closer to what's going on in the original post. No one's life is threatened, but the letter of the law has been broken. Would it be tasteful to put up such a site?

mcdonje 5y ago

Matomo makes the same case, but in a much more tasteful way: https://matomo.org/google-analytics-alternative/ https://matomo.org/google-analytics-alternative/

rapnie 5y ago
Here's the comparison of Plausible Analytics: https://plausible.io/vs-google-analytics https://plausible.io/vs-google-analytics
- mcdonje 5y ago
  Also well done.

mitchdoogle 5y ago

This kind of marketing is pretty common on HN. Provocative title and a blog post (written as if they're an independent observer) that presents a 'problem' and conveniently their product is perfect for solving it. The worst is these things get tons of upvotes.

dylan604 5y ago
The readers of HN are human after all, unless you're all bots and I'm the last human. Oh gawd, what if I'm not human either. Oh crap, now I'm going to be fretting over that all day. If you see a title, you have no idea it is from a 1st party or 3rd party until you read the article. Or, you could just come to the comments an diatribe away. That's the internet way, and claiming to be morally better than the internet is the HN way.
- djrogers 5y ago
  > unless you're all bots and I'm the last human Checks out - I'm a bot.
- mitchdoogle 5y ago
  As they say, a sucker is born every minute
BlueTemplar 5y ago
At least, unlike for the overwhelming majority of articles, the title is by the author himself.

foxfluff 5y ago

> I dislike Google and their products pretty much universally, but having this sort of thing done by a competitor is not just distasteful, I see it as verging on corporatism. Don't shoot the messenger? I think everyone should have the right to voice opinions and point out problems with products, competitors or not. As long as the claims are factual and not FUD and bullshit. (I'm reminded of fud campaigns made e.g. by big corporations against open source, backed by their own shady fudfactory studies) If a company can -- without lying or twisting facts -- point out that their competitor's product is dangerous/illegal/unsuitable/{whatever is relevant to me}, I'm all open. Of course, the line between a fud campaign and plain good old information is sometimes very thin.

throwhauser 5y ago

If it pushes all companies to be clear about their potential GDPR issues, I'm all for it. Let them compete on ease of compliance. As it is, it's very difficult to tell if something you're using is gathering data that you don't intend to gather (e.g. your hosting provider logging IP addresses for your hand-coded blogging software). I don't want to have even the tiniest possibility of being on the receiving end of one of those theoretically huge GDPR fines just by self-publishing some code and putting it on the internet.

Sebb767 5y ago

> Make a better product and beat them, don't use the fact that a government is banning them to upsell your own tracking software. I love that you casually put not being illegal on the same level as a dashboard or a convenience feature.

Volker_W 5y ago

> Make a better product Their product is open source and (assuming the say the truth) keeps the data on the server of the website owner. I would say this is better.

tehwebguy 5y ago

Using Google Fonts on this is hilarious and bad, otherwise though this post makes no sense. Pointing out your competitors flaws is part of competition and, I’d guess, an important driver for fixing or eliminating those flaws market wide.

KronisLV 5y ago

> PS: What adds salt to injury is that you're using Google Fonts on this website. If you were privacy-conscious, you'd self-host at least. I get what you're saying, but i feel like that's probably a sliding scale of how much people actually care about these things vs how much they want to just easily get things done. For example, right now my personal website serves the following files, just to get Open Sans working: /fonts/open-sans-latin.woff2 /fonts/open-sans-latin-ext.woff2 /fonts/open-sans-latin-bold.woff2 /fonts/open-sans-latin-ext-bold.woff2 What's the CSS for displaying just one of those fonts? It's the following: /* latin */ @font-face { font-family: 'Open Sans'; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; font-display: swap; src: local('Open Sans'), url(/fonts/open-sans-latin.woff2) format('woff2'); unicode-range: U+0000-00FF, U+0131, U+0152-0153, U+02BB-02BC, U+02C6, U+02DA, U+02DC, U+2000-206F, U+2074, U+20AC, U+2122, U+2191, U+2193, U+2212, U+2215, U+FEFF, U+FFFD; } Of course, depending on the browsers that you want to support and how efficient you want things to be, you might end up using more than just the WOFF2 format or just adding a TTF font and calling it a day, which will further inflate the amount of configuration that you need. Furthermore, the characters that you'll want to show on your site will also make you write more code, just look at what Google does for Open Sans: https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=Open+Sans&display=swap https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=Open+Sans&display=s... Oh, and more styles? Well, be ready to add all of those as well, since most of the fonts out there won't necessarily be variable: https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Open+Sans#standard-styles https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Open+Sans#standard-styles In comparison, Google Fonts just lets you choose what you want and copy something like the following: HTML: <link rel="preconnect" href="https://fonts.googleapis.com"> <link rel="preconnect" href="https://fonts.gstatic.com" crossorigin> <link href="https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=Open+Sans:wght@400;700&display=swap" rel="stylesheet"> CSS: font-family: 'Open Sans', sans-serif; While we're on the topic of fonts, it's a shame that we don't think more about how heavy the fonts we choose to use are, since right now serving my own fonts eats up around half of the bandwidth on my non-image-heavy site. The single article that i've found on the topic so far as been this, "Smallest (file size) Google Web Fonts": http://www.oxfordshireweb.com/smallest-file-size-google-web-fonts/ http://www.oxfordshireweb.com/smallest-file-size-google-web-... In my opinion, those sizes should also be readily available in the web UI of Google Fonts, or most other sites that recommend fonts out there!

woah 5y ago

This is a bad take. The problem with Google analytics is that it allows Google to surveil everyone's movements around the entire internet. This is enabled by the fact that for a long time, Google analytics was the best analytics product and it is free. I've been in the position myself with personal project websites of trying to decide whether I'm just not going to know anything about what my users are doing, whether I'm going to try to hook up some janky open source alternative, or whether I'm going to give in to the surveillance machine. The competitor that put up this site appears to be a company that provides analytics that are not centrally collected and analyzed to serve ads across the internet. Their entire selling point seems to be that they do not engage in mass surveillance. Equating this to what Google analytics does (if this competitor's claims are accurate) is a false equivalency. To me, this is no more objectionable than a foam insulation manufacturer capitalizing on asbestos bans.

hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
Totally agree. I really don't have any objections to analytics that are run solely by the website provider, as long as those analytics are only used to investigate usage and issues on that website. I don't have any problem with coffeegrinders.com knowing all about how I use their site to find good coffee grinders, but I DON'T want that correlated with my choice of mildly NSFW Tumbler videos. It's pretty inherent to the way the web works in any case, where you're not just being broadcasted to but are having a back-and-forth conversation with the website. The primary problem with surveillance capitalism is when your movement across the entire Internet is gobbled up, sliced, and aggregated for the largest bidder.
- whimsicalism 5y ago
  What about a social media service recommending you advertisements solely based off of analytics derived from your actions on that website?
  - hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
    I don't have objections to that, similar to how I don't have objections to a search engine showing me ads solely based on what I've typed in to the search engine. Indeed, I really feel that Google and Facebook turned "evil" (whatever that means) when the huge amount of customer data available to them from their own sites was no longer enough, but they demanded on vacuuming up your actions on every single corner of the Internet to add to their already gargantuan piles of dough.

pyrale 5y ago

> Make a better product and beat them It's really hard to make that claim when Google is known for anticompetitive behaviour, including crippling GA competitors [1]. We should probably acknowledge that Google is in the terminal phase where only forced split and divesture will help, and in the meantime, every action from competitors is fair game. [1]: https://forum.matomo.org/t/adwords-campaign-rejected-for-google-matomo-javascript-is-a-malware/35131/8 https://forum.matomo.org/t/adwords-campaign-rejected-for-goo... https://matomo.org/faq/troubleshooting/antivirus-program-or-malware-checker-or-google-ads-claim-that-matomo-js-or-piwik-js-are-malware-what-can-i-do/ https://matomo.org/faq/troubleshooting/antivirus-program-or-...

axiosgunnar 5y ago

If their product does not violate the GDPR, their product is a better product. It's just that website creators were defaulting to "just use Google Analytics" because it's convenient and they didn't care about their user's human right to privacy, and were thus externalizing human rights violations onto them. The government is simply preventing externalization of harm, which even libertarians will agree if the governments job (of course agreeing on what level of spying is harmful is where the debate will be).

StreamBright 5y ago

How exactly you propose of doing that? I cannot convince frontend devs to not use Google fonts directly and upload it to their own CDN.

belorn 5y ago

In industries that successfully self-regulate we find that good products that follow regulations out compete those that don't. In those cases politicians also tend to avoid adding regulations in order to not disrupt a working system. In industries that don't successfully self-regulate we get politicians that force a regulation in order to have good product out compete bad ones. It is especially common with lemon markets where information asymmetry between buyers and sellers is a significant reason of good products being unable to fairly compete with bad ones. The value of personal information is a notoriously lemon market where the buyer, ie users, are not aware of the actually cost to themselves or to whom they are selling their information. One of the first requirements in GDPR is fixing part of this by forcing companies to disclose to whom the information is sent to. Secondly it partially address the cost aspect by forcing companies to disclose how the information get used and thus what the real cost to the user is. A bit like how banks need to disclose what the interest of a loan actually will be before the consumer signs the contract. What makes privacy issues an even bigger issue is that the cost is not carried by the party who decide and benefits from the choice of analytic software. This is similar to environmental issues where the cost of a decision is not carried by the company that made it, but rather by those around them. Environmental issues is a typical example where self-regulations do not seem to work, as the end consumer has no information if a certain clothing item is made from child labor or by a eco friendly operation. A regulations job there is to put down some minimum standards that everyone need to follow, including information disclosure so that end users can actually know what they are paying for and how much.

boomlinde 5y ago

What is corporatism in the sense that this is verging on it? > Make a better product and beat them, don't use the fact that a government is banning them to upsell your own tracking software. Google Analytics is not a good product if it can't legally be used. The competitor in this case is offering a better product because it can legally be used.