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The announcement says it wants to "protect consumers", but it changes user tracking from opt-in to opt-out... How about ensuring that companies stop tracking pe

by dbrgn 4y ago

The announcement says it wants to "protect consumers", but it changes user tracking from opt-in to opt-out... How about ensuring that companies stop tracking people unnecessarily? I see so many websites – even club websites or private blogs – that have a cookie consent banner, but which wouldn't actually need one if they'd just turn off Google Analytics. I just don't get it.

hericium 4y ago
> wouldn't actually need one if they'd just turn off Google Analytics. Isn't one of the incentives for Analytics, that by knowing your audience Google will be able to suggest your site to their search engine users? I've heard more than once something in the lines of "we can't disable analytics as we'd lose traffic".
- weird-eye-issue 4y ago
  What are you talking about? I've been in SEO for a while and there are a lot of myths but I've never heard anything quite this wrong before.
  - Ensorceled 4y ago
    It's a pretty persistent "myth" ... do you have any support that it's a myth other than "I've been in SEO for a while"?
    - mikestew 4y ago
      Do you have any support that it’s not a myth, other than…”a lot of people are saying…”? I mean, burden’s on the one making the claim, not the other way around.
      - Ensorceled 4y ago
        There are literally "a lot of people saying" it isn't a myth, I've heard them, and one guy saying it is a myth and is an expert ... so, seems like that expert could straighten the issue out for us? I mean, the burden is on both sides here but one has "been in SEO for a while".
        nicbou 4y ago
        What's asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. Also the first claim is not falsifiable.
        Ensorceled 4y ago
        Ummm, sure, I'm not disputing that. Just saying the expert could do us a favour ...
    - weird-eye-issue 4y ago
      Google doesn't need GA data. They know how many times people see sites in search results, how many people click them, and if people go back to make the same search again. Besides, GA data is easily faked. I can give a site a low bounce rate or make it look like people spend a long time on a page. Google can't trust their own Analytics data because of this since it is client provided. Sounds like a myth non-SEO people believe because, again, I've never even heard this before. And SEOs believe a lot of myths but this one is just too stupid
  - fooey 4y ago
    Yeah, it's obviously an urban legend People will do an update on their site, which includes removing GA, then blame GA exclusively for tanking their rankings. All of which is probably coincidental to an algorithm change that was going to de-rank them anyways
    - hericium 4y ago
      > Yeah, it's obviously an urban legend Urban legend clearly benefiting Google.
- that_guy_iain 4y ago
  For most people, analytics is just about know how much traffic you're getting and where it's coming from and what they're doing on your site. For example, if 30% of the visitors from reddit.com convert to paying customers but 60% of users from indiehackers.com convert to paying customers you'll know to spend time, money, etc on indiehackers.com. Also, my understanding is Google pretends like they don't really look at your traffic data and use that for search.
- slenk 4y ago
  Maybe they'd lose the ability to correlate traffic to your ad revenue, but having google analytics or not does not determine if you get traffic
Reason077 4y ago
> "The announcement says it wants to "protect consumers", but it changes user tracking from opt-in to opt-out... " The cookie-blocking features in modern browsers (except Chrome, probably, haha) effectively make tracking opt-in anyway, don't they? The cookie pop-ups are pretty redundant today. Not to suggest that this makes all the down sides of Brexit worthwhile, but it does make me happy that this can now be addressed. Cookie popups seriously harm the usability of the web and have been one of the most highly visible and ill-conceived pieces of EU legislation.
- phh 4y ago
  I guess anti-GDPR won. So-called "Cookie popups" are about so much more than cookies. Looks like anti-GPDR marketing managed to make even technically-literate people unaware of their rights. If you're using a menstruating-cycle app, GPDR will protect you against the app owner publicizing your name that you're pregnant, and thus protect you against anti-abortion mobs, if you wish to abort. A cookie banner wouldn't do that. Because GPDR is NOT about the cookies. If we were to speak exclusively about tracking (which is, again, a very very small part of GPDR), even simply dismissing as a browser-side "feature" is yet another brainwashing win from anti-GPDR marketing. The number of ways to track people in a browser is infinite. From canvas rendering, to DRM, from cache leakage to window size. Hell, even the GPDR banners explicitly say so! Most GPDR banners now contains an option to allow site owner to fingerprint your browser to track you. Considering the way we went with browsers (was it right adding so many features? I don't know. But the effects are there), we CAN NOT put this on browsers, it is technically impossible. If Google wants to prove the world that it is possible, fine, I'll grab popcorn. But at the moment they are not even trying. So no, history has proven again and again that those privacy issues can not be handled technically. Only through regulation can privacy be preserved.
  - chrismorgan 4y ago
    I think the really crazy thing about the cookie banner stuff is that it’s actually nothing to do with GDPR: it’s almost entirely about the ePrivacy Directive of 2002. Yes, 2002. (At that time it was opt-out, but you still had to disclose clearly; in 2009, it was revised to opt-in, and there was again very minor fuss but not much compliance.) It’s just that most people didn’t do much about it until GDPR came along, and then people conflated the two.
kmeisthax 4y ago
The goal of the announcement is purely to make the EU look stuffy and bureaucratic. "Look, we got rid of those annoying cookie pop-ups THEY forced on US!" Tories need this because of two reasons: 1. Brexit is hurting the UK economy 2. They need to distract from the Partygate scandals[0] As for Google Analytics... I've talked with multiple clients who have wanted to improve site performance on their stores. The first thing I usually point out is the multiple overlapping analytics packages downloading multi-megabyte JavaScript files. Those are, of course, absolutely untouchable for whatever reason, and we just have to work around the most obvious performance flaws in their site. The reasons why someone might tank their site performance with a bunch of conflicting ad trackers is not just because "data is valuable". We're conditioned to think of ad tracking as solely interest targeting[1] and remarketing[2], but a huge part of it is also just attribution. Advertising is paid for on a per-click or per-conversion basis, and nobody trusts nobody in this industry, so everything needs to be tracked or the people buying ads get gamed out of their money by the people they buy ads from.[3] So even if you just want to buy ads, you often also need to have tracking on your website purely so that the ad network can either protect you from click fraud, or if you're paying per conversion, actually track how much you owe them. [0] For those who are not in the UK, like me: The scandal is the fact that the PM and his staff were running a bunch of illegal parties while the whole country was on COVID lockdowns. [1] When ad networks track your interests to serve more relevant ads. As the ad buyer you can purchase ads based on these specific interest categories; i.e. "I want this ad to be served to 40-year-old men with an interest in cars" [2] When ad networks track your history to serve ads based on what sites you've visited recently. This is actually a different thing from interest-related ads; it's more like "I want this ad to be served to anyone who has just gone car shopping". [3] This is also why on-domain advertising will never be a thing outside of the big social media networks.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- phh 4y ago
  > The reasons why someone might tank their site performance with a bunch of conflicting ad trackers is not just because "data is valuable". We're conditioned to think of ad tracking as solely interest targeting[1] and remarketing[2], but a huge part of it is also just attribution. Advertising is paid for on a per-click or per-conversion basis, and nobody trusts nobody in this industry, so everything needs to be tracked or the people buying ads get gamed out of their money by the people they buy ads from.[3] So even if you just want to buy ads, you often also need to have tracking on your website purely so that the ad network can either protect you from click fraud, or if you're paying per conversion, actually track how much you owe them. Thanks. I think this is severely understated. Ad people managed to force the debate to "customized ads" vs "privacy", saying that websites could make money exclusively with customized ads. We've seen here on HN a lot of examples of people realizing that was bullshit (I would guess there are some cases where customized ads can be beneficial, but overall they seem little). Apple showed how to make attribution privacy-friendly (I have no idea whether there implementation works and scale), yet debates still manage to ignore that totally. That being said, solving attribution doesn't actually... solve attribution problem. The reason being for the case where I search Nokia D3500 on Amazon, then I go on random website, which will show me ads for Nokia D3500 on Amazon, and I click on this ad to buy what I already planned to buy. In that case, the random website will get money, with current unprivate ads, while they won't with the private one. I didn't change my consumption based on that ad, so the ad has literally 0 value, "private-friendly ad" properly reflects that, however the migration from not private to private ad will reduce the revenue for websites (even though this didn't have any impact on my purchasing behavior). Edit: It does solve attribution for "proper meaningful" ads: If I'm reading camera reviews on some websites, and they have affiliated links for those reviews, then they'll rightfully get money for it, whcih is good!
jasonkester 4y ago
The popups are annoying specifically because the rules lumped Google Analytics in with all the bad tracking that evil companies do. I want to know how many people visited my website. So does every website. It's something that websites need to know. We use Analytics to handle that for us, and because of this silly EU rule we're all technically breaking the law by not bothering every single visitor with annoying popups. Now there are in fact bad companies collecting data on individual people, correlating it between sites on the backend, and using it for nefarious purposes. Those are presumably the reason these stupid laws were passed in the first place, and it would be nice if they actually did need to show a button for you to click. But since the law says that everybody needs to show that button or lose the ability to know how many people saw their site, you never know whether you're getting the button for an evil site or just one of the millions of other sites you visit every day. I don't blame the evil companies even a little bit for this mess. It's the people who passed these terribly thought out laws. They'll keep passing more of them until we stop letting them.
- weberer 4y ago
  >I want to know how many people visited my website. So does every website You can do that easily without third-party tracking cookies.
  - jefftk 4y ago
    Google Analytics doesn't use any third-party cookies; it uses first-party cookies only. [EDIT: this is too broad; see comments below] While the JS is loaded from a third-party origin, its notion of identity is entirely per-site. (Disclosure: I used to work on ads at Google)
    - btdmaster 4y ago
      It seems certain features are restricted to third-party cookies: https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/gtagjs/cookie-usage https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection.... In practice though, moving from third-party to first-party is simply a way to reduce the probability that the spyware gets blocked by the user agent.
that_guy_iain 4y ago
>I see so many websites – even club websites or private blogs – that have a cookie consent banner, but which wouldn't actually need one if they'd just turn off Google Analytics. I just don't get it. Actually, most are probably not even correctly following the law since the cookies will probably be set before the popup is accepted. For most, people just assume they need a cookie banner. I'm pretty sure I've seen cookie banners on sites that had no cookies.
- qclibre22 4y ago
  Google will down rank if you don't use their analytics cookies.
  - eropple 4y ago
    Is this true? I'd believe it (edit: though, as noted elsewhere in the thread, it seems like it'd carry some business risk), but I haven't seen it.
    - that_guy_iain 4y ago
      If it is true it's an anti-trust lawsuit waiting to happen. I highly doubt it is true. Keeping that secret in the bag would be hard in my opinion. We're constantly getting leaks from Google.
      - thayne 4y ago
        A lot of stuff google does would be an anti-trust lawsuit waiting to happen. If you know, anti-trust was actually enforced.
        that_guy_iain 4y ago
        The EU would 100% enforce that. The EU hits them constantly for their bs.
tensor 4y ago
You just don't get that website owners want basic metrics to help them understand the health and performance of their website?
CommanderData 4y ago
The current UK govnement isn't interested in people's rights despite lots of catch phrases from Nadine Dorris which might make it seem so. Each passing day the govnement becomes more and more deceptive
lakomen 4y ago
A few days ago I visited a German provincial government website that had a cookie banner for the cookie banner provider. It's really funny if it wasn't so stupid.
zaphirplane 4y ago
I found this site they as you to fill a form with your information … when you click don’t sell my data https://smallstep.com/blog/ https://smallstep.com/blog/

by dbrgn 4y ago

hericium 4y ago

> wouldn't actually need one if they'd just turn off Google Analytics. Isn't one of the incentives for Analytics, that by knowing your audience Google will be able to suggest your site to their search engine users? I've heard more than once something in the lines of "we can't disable analytics as we'd lose traffic".

weird-eye-issue 4y ago
What are you talking about? I've been in SEO for a while and there are a lot of myths but I've never heard anything quite this wrong before.
- Ensorceled 4y ago
  It's a pretty persistent "myth" ... do you have any support that it's a myth other than "I've been in SEO for a while"?
  - mikestew 4y ago
    Do you have any support that it’s not a myth, other than…”a lot of people are saying…”? I mean, burden’s on the one making the claim, not the other way around.
    - Ensorceled 4y ago
      There are literally "a lot of people saying" it isn't a myth, I've heard them, and one guy saying it is a myth and is an expert ... so, seems like that expert could straighten the issue out for us? I mean, the burden is on both sides here but one has "been in SEO for a while".
      - nicbou 4y ago
        What's asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. Also the first claim is not falsifiable.
        Ensorceled 4y ago
        Ummm, sure, I'm not disputing that. Just saying the expert could do us a favour ...
  - weird-eye-issue 4y ago
    Google doesn't need GA data. They know how many times people see sites in search results, how many people click them, and if people go back to make the same search again. Besides, GA data is easily faked. I can give a site a low bounce rate or make it look like people spend a long time on a page. Google can't trust their own Analytics data because of this since it is client provided. Sounds like a myth non-SEO people believe because, again, I've never even heard this before. And SEOs believe a lot of myths but this one is just too stupid
- fooey 4y ago
  Yeah, it's obviously an urban legend People will do an update on their site, which includes removing GA, then blame GA exclusively for tanking their rankings. All of which is probably coincidental to an algorithm change that was going to de-rank them anyways
  - hericium 4y ago
    > Yeah, it's obviously an urban legend Urban legend clearly benefiting Google.
that_guy_iain 4y ago
For most people, analytics is just about know how much traffic you're getting and where it's coming from and what they're doing on your site. For example, if 30% of the visitors from reddit.com convert to paying customers but 60% of users from indiehackers.com convert to paying customers you'll know to spend time, money, etc on indiehackers.com. Also, my understanding is Google pretends like they don't really look at your traffic data and use that for search.
slenk 4y ago
Maybe they'd lose the ability to correlate traffic to your ad revenue, but having google analytics or not does not determine if you get traffic

Reason077 4y ago

> "The announcement says it wants to "protect consumers", but it changes user tracking from opt-in to opt-out... " The cookie-blocking features in modern browsers (except Chrome, probably, haha) effectively make tracking opt-in anyway, don't they? The cookie pop-ups are pretty redundant today. Not to suggest that this makes all the down sides of Brexit worthwhile, but it does make me happy that this can now be addressed. Cookie popups seriously harm the usability of the web and have been one of the most highly visible and ill-conceived pieces of EU legislation.

phh 4y ago
I guess anti-GDPR won. So-called "Cookie popups" are about so much more than cookies. Looks like anti-GPDR marketing managed to make even technically-literate people unaware of their rights. If you're using a menstruating-cycle app, GPDR will protect you against the app owner publicizing your name that you're pregnant, and thus protect you against anti-abortion mobs, if you wish to abort. A cookie banner wouldn't do that. Because GPDR is NOT about the cookies. If we were to speak exclusively about tracking (which is, again, a very very small part of GPDR), even simply dismissing as a browser-side "feature" is yet another brainwashing win from anti-GPDR marketing. The number of ways to track people in a browser is infinite. From canvas rendering, to DRM, from cache leakage to window size. Hell, even the GPDR banners explicitly say so! Most GPDR banners now contains an option to allow site owner to fingerprint your browser to track you. Considering the way we went with browsers (was it right adding so many features? I don't know. But the effects are there), we CAN NOT put this on browsers, it is technically impossible. If Google wants to prove the world that it is possible, fine, I'll grab popcorn. But at the moment they are not even trying. So no, history has proven again and again that those privacy issues can not be handled technically. Only through regulation can privacy be preserved.
- chrismorgan 4y ago
  I think the really crazy thing about the cookie banner stuff is that it’s actually nothing to do with GDPR: it’s almost entirely about the ePrivacy Directive of 2002. Yes, 2002. (At that time it was opt-out, but you still had to disclose clearly; in 2009, it was revised to opt-in, and there was again very minor fuss but not much compliance.) It’s just that most people didn’t do much about it until GDPR came along, and then people conflated the two.

kmeisthax 4y ago

The goal of the announcement is purely to make the EU look stuffy and bureaucratic. "Look, we got rid of those annoying cookie pop-ups THEY forced on US!" Tories need this because of two reasons: 1. Brexit is hurting the UK economy 2. They need to distract from the Partygate scandals[0] As for Google Analytics... I've talked with multiple clients who have wanted to improve site performance on their stores. The first thing I usually point out is the multiple overlapping analytics packages downloading multi-megabyte JavaScript files. Those are, of course, absolutely untouchable for whatever reason, and we just have to work around the most obvious performance flaws in their site. The reasons why someone might tank their site performance with a bunch of conflicting ad trackers is not just because "data is valuable". We're conditioned to think of ad tracking as solely interest targeting[1] and remarketing[2], but a huge part of it is also just attribution. Advertising is paid for on a per-click or per-conversion basis, and nobody trusts nobody in this industry, so everything needs to be tracked or the people buying ads get gamed out of their money by the people they buy ads from.[3] So even if you just want to buy ads, you often also need to have tracking on your website purely so that the ad network can either protect you from click fraud, or if you're paying per conversion, actually track how much you owe them. [0] For those who are not in the UK, like me: The scandal is the fact that the PM and his staff were running a bunch of illegal parties while the whole country was on COVID lockdowns. [1] When ad networks track your interests to serve more relevant ads. As the ad buyer you can purchase ads based on these specific interest categories; i.e. "I want this ad to be served to 40-year-old men with an interest in cars" [2] When ad networks track your history to serve ads based on what sites you've visited recently. This is actually a different thing from interest-related ads; it's more like "I want this ad to be served to anyone who has just gone car shopping". [3] This is also why on-domain advertising will never be a thing outside of the big social media networks.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
phh 4y ago
> The reasons why someone might tank their site performance with a bunch of conflicting ad trackers is not just because "data is valuable". We're conditioned to think of ad tracking as solely interest targeting[1] and remarketing[2], but a huge part of it is also just attribution. Advertising is paid for on a per-click or per-conversion basis, and nobody trusts nobody in this industry, so everything needs to be tracked or the people buying ads get gamed out of their money by the people they buy ads from.[3] So even if you just want to buy ads, you often also need to have tracking on your website purely so that the ad network can either protect you from click fraud, or if you're paying per conversion, actually track how much you owe them. Thanks. I think this is severely understated. Ad people managed to force the debate to "customized ads" vs "privacy", saying that websites could make money exclusively with customized ads. We've seen here on HN a lot of examples of people realizing that was bullshit (I would guess there are some cases where customized ads can be beneficial, but overall they seem little). Apple showed how to make attribution privacy-friendly (I have no idea whether there implementation works and scale), yet debates still manage to ignore that totally. That being said, solving attribution doesn't actually... solve attribution problem. The reason being for the case where I search Nokia D3500 on Amazon, then I go on random website, which will show me ads for Nokia D3500 on Amazon, and I click on this ad to buy what I already planned to buy. In that case, the random website will get money, with current unprivate ads, while they won't with the private one. I didn't change my consumption based on that ad, so the ad has literally 0 value, "private-friendly ad" properly reflects that, however the migration from not private to private ad will reduce the revenue for websites (even though this didn't have any impact on my purchasing behavior). Edit: It does solve attribution for "proper meaningful" ads: If I'm reading camera reviews on some websites, and they have affiliated links for those reviews, then they'll rightfully get money for it, whcih is good!

jasonkester 4y ago

The popups are annoying specifically because the rules lumped Google Analytics in with all the bad tracking that evil companies do. I want to know how many people visited my website. So does every website. It's something that websites need to know. We use Analytics to handle that for us, and because of this silly EU rule we're all technically breaking the law by not bothering every single visitor with annoying popups. Now there are in fact bad companies collecting data on individual people, correlating it between sites on the backend, and using it for nefarious purposes. Those are presumably the reason these stupid laws were passed in the first place, and it would be nice if they actually did need to show a button for you to click. But since the law says that everybody needs to show that button or lose the ability to know how many people saw their site, you never know whether you're getting the button for an evil site or just one of the millions of other sites you visit every day. I don't blame the evil companies even a little bit for this mess. It's the people who passed these terribly thought out laws. They'll keep passing more of them until we stop letting them.

weberer 4y ago
>I want to know how many people visited my website. So does every website You can do that easily without third-party tracking cookies.
- jefftk 4y ago
  Google Analytics doesn't use any third-party cookies; it uses first-party cookies only. [EDIT: this is too broad; see comments below] While the JS is loaded from a third-party origin, its notion of identity is entirely per-site. (Disclosure: I used to work on ads at Google)
  - btdmaster 4y ago
    It seems certain features are restricted to third-party cookies: https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/gtagjs/cookie-usage https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection.... In practice though, moving from third-party to first-party is simply a way to reduce the probability that the spyware gets blocked by the user agent.

that_guy_iain 4y ago

>I see so many websites – even club websites or private blogs – that have a cookie consent banner, but which wouldn't actually need one if they'd just turn off Google Analytics. I just don't get it. Actually, most are probably not even correctly following the law since the cookies will probably be set before the popup is accepted. For most, people just assume they need a cookie banner. I'm pretty sure I've seen cookie banners on sites that had no cookies.

qclibre22 4y ago
Google will down rank if you don't use their analytics cookies.
- eropple 4y ago
  Is this true? I'd believe it (edit: though, as noted elsewhere in the thread, it seems like it'd carry some business risk), but I haven't seen it.
  - that_guy_iain 4y ago
    If it is true it's an anti-trust lawsuit waiting to happen. I highly doubt it is true. Keeping that secret in the bag would be hard in my opinion. We're constantly getting leaks from Google.
    - thayne 4y ago
      A lot of stuff google does would be an anti-trust lawsuit waiting to happen. If you know, anti-trust was actually enforced.
      - that_guy_iain 4y ago
        The EU would 100% enforce that. The EU hits them constantly for their bs.

tensor 4y ago

You just don't get that website owners want basic metrics to help them understand the health and performance of their website?

CommanderData 4y ago

The current UK govnement isn't interested in people's rights despite lots of catch phrases from Nadine Dorris which might make it seem so. Each passing day the govnement becomes more and more deceptive

lakomen 4y ago

A few days ago I visited a German provincial government website that had a cookie banner for the cookie banner provider. It's really funny if it wasn't so stupid.

zaphirplane 4y ago

I found this site they as you to fill a form with your information … when you click don’t sell my data https://smallstep.com/blog/ https://smallstep.com/blog/