7 ms·

You don't need GA for a website either. Many websites probably don't even need any form of analytics at all.

by demindiro 5y ago

pyronik19 5y ago
Do you really think we are in a better place now with GPDR and all these annoying cookie banners all over the place?
- dale_glass 5y ago
  Overall, yes. At the very least it's been incredibly enlightening. It's amazing how random websites have 50 "partners" all of which for some reason need to know what I'm doing.
  - nickpp 5y ago
    So you think your "enlightenment" is worth the millions of work-hours people are putting in just to read and click a cookie banner they give absolutely not a single crap about?
    - jen20 5y ago
      They wouldn't have to do this if they didn't spew personal information indiscriminately to scumbag "partners". So yes, I do think that is worthwhile. The cost is born by the correct people.
      - nickpp 5y ago
        The cost is borne by every single internet user in EU clicking countless stupid boxes every single day - for nothing. Also by the EU users losing access to ad-supported free services.
        FredPret 5y ago
        And every single user outside the EU. I never voted for these crazy runaway regulations, but I can’t browse many sites on mobile at all with all the damn banners. EU bureaucrats are effectively prescribing how the web should work for everyone. Ridiculous.
        dale_glass 5y ago
        Not for nothing, as you can see in this post. Little by little we're stopping to send private data to the US. That's a good thing, even if it's painful at the start.
        nickpp 5y ago
        >That's a good thing Says who?! I have zero problems sending my private data to the US. I did it for years and I still think is one of the better places to send my private data to. Definitely better than my own country.
        dale_glass 5y ago
        Me, obviously, since I made the comment? And why the heck would I want to give my data to a bunch of random companies? What's the benefit in it for me, anyway?
        nickpp 5y ago
        > What's the benefit in it for me, anyway? Free content and services. What do you lose in exchange?
        dale_glass 5y ago
        Answering here because there's a thread depth limit. > Free content and services. What do you lose in exchange? Privacy. What I do shouldn't really be anybody else's business. An ad-targeted web. IMO ads are a plague on useful content, because everything is about getting views and clicks. This makes actual content less useful and more annoying to consume. It incentivizes posting low effort, watered down content rather than smaller amounts of great content. It also means content creators are trying to please the advertiser, and not me. Risk of manipulation. Lots of effort has gone into figuring out how to best manipulate people, and when you know who somebody is and how to best tailor any given message to them, you can get pretty far. I'm quite sure that I also have buttons that can be pushed if somebody knows how, and I don't particularly like the thought of that.
    - account42 5y ago
      Yes.
      - nickpp 5y ago
        Never a shortage of people willing to dictate other people how to live their lives.
        smolder 5y ago
        Never a shortage of people mad that they can't eat trans fats or inhale leaded gasoline exhaust anymore, either. Not great analogies, since giving up personal info to use free services is a reasonable choice for individuals... But in aggregate, it's like giving up a bit of sovereignty to be that transparent. Microtargetting has helped enable some serious societal harms, i.e. spreading lies to the gullible while evading scrutiny from others, and that pales to how intelligence agencies can use the hoards of personal data. I think France and the EU are moving in the right direction, given the CLOUD act exists, and given all the other bad societal effects enabled by a surveillance focused economy. US politics hasn't weathered the shift well, unless of course your fitness function for politics is how resilient the elected government is against voters, i.e. how little can it serve their interests without losing power.
        account42 5y ago
        Noone is dictating you how to live your life. The recent EU privacy laws are about giving people a choice how there data is used. You are free to accept the cookies. You are even free to automate that via browser extensions. You are free to build websites in ways that don't require tracking user data and thus don't require consent. You are free to vote for politicans that are against privacy right or even campaign yourself. But a fundamental issue with freedom is that sometimes freedoms conflict with each other. Here the freedom to do whatever you want conflicts with the right to privacy of others and the EU has decided that in this instance the right to privace takes precedence.
        nickpp 5y ago
        I am not free to use add-supported US services when they stop being provided to EU citizens due the onerous requirements imposed on them by privacy laws. I am not free to use a website and give away "my data" by default without having to click Allow All on a damn cookie popup. The EU politicians unilaterally decided to steal these freedoms from all EU citizens. The right to privacy is not a freedom. I am not sure it's even a real right. But it was easily accessible even before the current privacy laws, even if it needed a little technical competence. It wasn't the default though. And the current laws do not provide me the privacy I actually need: from EU government(s).
- rascul 5y ago
  Cookie banners were already a thing before GDPR.
- p_l 5y ago
  You know those "cookie banners" are illegal under GDPR too, and done specifically to annoy people into agreeing?
  - xtracto 5y ago
    This is so funny. Under GDPR everything is illegal, the only legal website is no website. Good for Europe, they are just going to law themselves out of the internet. Up to the point were your ISP doing hops to send your TCP packet will be illegal unless you approve them sharing that info with all the shops.
    - FredPret 5y ago
      What about clicking or typing in a site? Is your webserver processing those? That means you’re gratuitously using user data to run your for-profit business! That should be illegal! /s
- datavirtue 5y ago
  Hell yeah. The banners are the fault of the website owner. They don't have to display them.
  - shadowgovt 5y ago
    But they do, and it's terrible. I feel for my European brothers and sisters these days. As an American, I hardly ever see these banners. Went to an EU country for work and... Holy cow. Y'all get these banners every site. How do you tolerate it?
    - nickpp 5y ago
      Searching for "Allow All" becomes a reflex after a while. I don't know anybody rejecting anything anymore, it's even worse.
      - shadowgovt 5y ago
        Honestly, I've never felt the urge to reject. I'm a guest in their data house, soaking their bandwidth for free. Track away.
    - can16358p 5y ago
      This is weird. I'm neither in US or Europe but still see all those cookie banners everywhere on every site. Thanks to GDPR, we have a much more private web. /s
- jen20 5y ago
  Do you really think GDPR and cookie banners are related? Most are non-compliant in the first place, and were around for years beforehand. Yes, I think we're in a vastly better place, where there is a cost to doing bad things.
  - nickpp 5y ago
    Unfortunately the cost in borne by us, regular EU internet users through a much degraded Internet browsing experience.
- M2Ys4U 5y ago
  100%. (Also, the GDPR is not responsible for cookie banners)
  - shadowgovt 5y ago
    Good law understands consequences. The market responding to the law with billions of cookie banners was as predictable as prohibition leading to bootlegging.
    - M2Ys4U 5y ago
      >The market responding to the law with billions of cookie banners was as predictable as prohibition leading to bootlegging. And now the regulators are responding to it.[0] [0] https://www.iccl.ie/news/gdpr-enforcer-rules-that-iab-europes-consent-popups-are-unlawful/ https://www.iccl.ie/news/gdpr-enforcer-rules-that-iab-europe...
      - shadowgovt 5y ago
        That ruling declares that a centralized solution is no good. The predictable outcome from that ruling is a decentralized solution: a few libraries attempting to build frameworks that are compliant, everyone implementing their own one-off versions of permission-granting and cookie consent using those frmeworks as a basis, and the Authority chasing mom-and-pop sites that are out of compliance until the sun goes cold. In a sense, that may satisfy the goals: the data will be decentralized, stored widely, and harder to aggregate. On the other hand, what we learned from the virus era and the Windows OS monoculture is thousands of nodes running the same software (but not centrally maintained; maintained by people who have a job other than maintaining a website and are therefore slow to patch security holes) will be vulnerable to scripted attacks against frameworks. My prediction is a net increase in stolen PII and, while individual site-runners will get screwed, the number of sites collecting the data won't go down. It's just too valuable, and the odds you will get hit by a hacker are too low. In any case, it'll be a hell of a ride.

You don't need GA for a website either. Many websites probably don't even need any form of analytics at all.

pyronik19 5y ago

Do you really think we are in a better place now with GPDR and all these annoying cookie banners all over the place?

dale_glass 5y ago
Overall, yes. At the very least it's been incredibly enlightening. It's amazing how random websites have 50 "partners" all of which for some reason need to know what I'm doing.
- nickpp 5y ago
  So you think your "enlightenment" is worth the millions of work-hours people are putting in just to read and click a cookie banner they give absolutely not a single crap about?
  - jen20 5y ago
    They wouldn't have to do this if they didn't spew personal information indiscriminately to scumbag "partners". So yes, I do think that is worthwhile. The cost is born by the correct people.
    - nickpp 5y ago
      The cost is borne by every single internet user in EU clicking countless stupid boxes every single day - for nothing. Also by the EU users losing access to ad-supported free services.
      - FredPret 5y ago
        And every single user outside the EU. I never voted for these crazy runaway regulations, but I can’t browse many sites on mobile at all with all the damn banners. EU bureaucrats are effectively prescribing how the web should work for everyone. Ridiculous.
      - dale_glass 5y ago
        Not for nothing, as you can see in this post. Little by little we're stopping to send private data to the US. That's a good thing, even if it's painful at the start.
        nickpp 5y ago
        >That's a good thing Says who?! I have zero problems sending my private data to the US. I did it for years and I still think is one of the better places to send my private data to. Definitely better than my own country.
        dale_glass 5y ago
        Me, obviously, since I made the comment? And why the heck would I want to give my data to a bunch of random companies? What's the benefit in it for me, anyway?
        nickpp 5y ago
        > What's the benefit in it for me, anyway? Free content and services. What do you lose in exchange?
        dale_glass 5y ago
        Answering here because there's a thread depth limit. > Free content and services. What do you lose in exchange? Privacy. What I do shouldn't really be anybody else's business. An ad-targeted web. IMO ads are a plague on useful content, because everything is about getting views and clicks. This makes actual content less useful and more annoying to consume. It incentivizes posting low effort, watered down content rather than smaller amounts of great content. It also means content creators are trying to please the advertiser, and not me. Risk of manipulation. Lots of effort has gone into figuring out how to best manipulate people, and when you know who somebody is and how to best tailor any given message to them, you can get pretty far. I'm quite sure that I also have buttons that can be pushed if somebody knows how, and I don't particularly like the thought of that.
  - account42 5y ago
    Yes.
    - nickpp 5y ago
      Never a shortage of people willing to dictate other people how to live their lives.
      - smolder 5y ago
        Never a shortage of people mad that they can't eat trans fats or inhale leaded gasoline exhaust anymore, either. Not great analogies, since giving up personal info to use free services is a reasonable choice for individuals... But in aggregate, it's like giving up a bit of sovereignty to be that transparent. Microtargetting has helped enable some serious societal harms, i.e. spreading lies to the gullible while evading scrutiny from others, and that pales to how intelligence agencies can use the hoards of personal data. I think France and the EU are moving in the right direction, given the CLOUD act exists, and given all the other bad societal effects enabled by a surveillance focused economy. US politics hasn't weathered the shift well, unless of course your fitness function for politics is how resilient the elected government is against voters, i.e. how little can it serve their interests without losing power.
      - account42 5y ago
        Noone is dictating you how to live your life. The recent EU privacy laws are about giving people a choice how there data is used. You are free to accept the cookies. You are even free to automate that via browser extensions. You are free to build websites in ways that don't require tracking user data and thus don't require consent. You are free to vote for politicans that are against privacy right or even campaign yourself. But a fundamental issue with freedom is that sometimes freedoms conflict with each other. Here the freedom to do whatever you want conflicts with the right to privacy of others and the EU has decided that in this instance the right to privace takes precedence.
        nickpp 5y ago
        I am not free to use add-supported US services when they stop being provided to EU citizens due the onerous requirements imposed on them by privacy laws. I am not free to use a website and give away "my data" by default without having to click Allow All on a damn cookie popup. The EU politicians unilaterally decided to steal these freedoms from all EU citizens. The right to privacy is not a freedom. I am not sure it's even a real right. But it was easily accessible even before the current privacy laws, even if it needed a little technical competence. It wasn't the default though. And the current laws do not provide me the privacy I actually need: from EU government(s).
rascul 5y ago
Cookie banners were already a thing before GDPR.
p_l 5y ago
You know those "cookie banners" are illegal under GDPR too, and done specifically to annoy people into agreeing?
- xtracto 5y ago
  This is so funny. Under GDPR everything is illegal, the only legal website is no website. Good for Europe, they are just going to law themselves out of the internet. Up to the point were your ISP doing hops to send your TCP packet will be illegal unless you approve them sharing that info with all the shops.
  - FredPret 5y ago
    What about clicking or typing in a site? Is your webserver processing those? That means you’re gratuitously using user data to run your for-profit business! That should be illegal! /s
datavirtue 5y ago
Hell yeah. The banners are the fault of the website owner. They don't have to display them.
- shadowgovt 5y ago
  But they do, and it's terrible. I feel for my European brothers and sisters these days. As an American, I hardly ever see these banners. Went to an EU country for work and... Holy cow. Y'all get these banners every site. How do you tolerate it?
  - nickpp 5y ago
    Searching for "Allow All" becomes a reflex after a while. I don't know anybody rejecting anything anymore, it's even worse.
    - shadowgovt 5y ago
      Honestly, I've never felt the urge to reject. I'm a guest in their data house, soaking their bandwidth for free. Track away.
  - can16358p 5y ago
    This is weird. I'm neither in US or Europe but still see all those cookie banners everywhere on every site. Thanks to GDPR, we have a much more private web. /s
jen20 5y ago
Do you really think GDPR and cookie banners are related? Most are non-compliant in the first place, and were around for years beforehand. Yes, I think we're in a vastly better place, where there is a cost to doing bad things.
- nickpp 5y ago
  Unfortunately the cost in borne by us, regular EU internet users through a much degraded Internet browsing experience.
M2Ys4U 5y ago
100%. (Also, the GDPR is not responsible for cookie banners)
- shadowgovt 5y ago
  Good law understands consequences. The market responding to the law with billions of cookie banners was as predictable as prohibition leading to bootlegging.
  - M2Ys4U 5y ago
    >The market responding to the law with billions of cookie banners was as predictable as prohibition leading to bootlegging. And now the regulators are responding to it.[0] [0] https://www.iccl.ie/news/gdpr-enforcer-rules-that-iab-europes-consent-popups-are-unlawful/ https://www.iccl.ie/news/gdpr-enforcer-rules-that-iab-europe...
    - shadowgovt 5y ago
      That ruling declares that a centralized solution is no good. The predictable outcome from that ruling is a decentralized solution: a few libraries attempting to build frameworks that are compliant, everyone implementing their own one-off versions of permission-granting and cookie consent using those frmeworks as a basis, and the Authority chasing mom-and-pop sites that are out of compliance until the sun goes cold. In a sense, that may satisfy the goals: the data will be decentralized, stored widely, and harder to aggregate. On the other hand, what we learned from the virus era and the Windows OS monoculture is thousands of nodes running the same software (but not centrally maintained; maintained by people who have a job other than maintaining a website and are therefore slow to patch security holes) will be vulnerable to scripted attacks against frameworks. My prediction is a net increase in stolen PII and, while individual site-runners will get screwed, the number of sites collecting the data won't go down. It's just too valuable, and the odds you will get hit by a hacker are too low. In any case, it'll be a hell of a ride.