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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 th

by 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.

by woah 5y ago

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.