3 ms·

Was going to mention this, almost any company's brand site will have tracking and analytics libraries set in place. Usually to farm marketing and UX feedback.

Was going to mention this, almost any company's brand site will have tracking and analytics libraries set in place. Usually to farm marketing and UX feedback. Whats worse is some of them are fetched externally rather than bundled with the host code thus increasing latency and potential security risks

tadfisher 3y ago
> Whats worse is some of them are fetched externally rather than bundled with the host code thus increasing latency and potential security risks Some vendor SDKs can be built and bundled from NPM, but most of them explicitly require you fetch their minified/obfuscated bundle from their CDN with a script tag. This is so they don't have to support older versions like most other software in the world, and so they can push updates without requiring customers to update their code. Try to use vendors that distribute open-source SDKs, if you have to use vendors.
willsmith72 3y ago
im pro privacy, but is it really so bad to get anonymous data about where people clicked and how long they stayed where? it would be almost impossible to measure success without it, whether it's a conversion funnel or tracking usage of a new feature
- kevin_thibedeau 3y ago
  That data can be gathered with self-hosted JS if the devs were allowed to implement it. The infatuation with third party analytics is just a more elaborate version of leftpad.
  - ehnto 3y ago
    Marketing snippets are rarely implemented by devs, they get dropped into a text box or added to Google Tags by marketing/SEO peeps. If it is put in by a developer, the budget for that is like an hour to copy paste the code snippet in the right spot. Few are going to pay the hours required for an in house data collection layer that then has to integrate with the third party if that's even an option. At least that is my experience through agency work. Maybe a product owner company could do it. Not to be rude to the industry either, but I don't see why the assumption would bet that an in house dev has the chops to not make the same mistakes a third party does.
    - RugnirViking 3y ago
      its not about having the chops to do it well, its about not importing every feature under the sun just because you want to do intern's first marketing analytics campaign. earlier in the conversation someone talked about pasting a snippet. We're talking about the "chops" to not paste a snippet that is hundreds of thousands of lines long. A snippet so long it would crash many editors.
      - ehnto 3y ago
        Typically the person including the JS tag that then fetches the massive third party payload has no idea that's what is happening. It is very common to get multiple departments and contracted companies sticking their misc JS in since every marketing SaaS tool they use has it's own snippet. Your SEO guy wants 3 trackers, your marketing has another 5, and you sell on XYZ online market and they have affilliate trackers etc. No devs engaged at any point and the site performance isn't their responsibility. They can't do their job without their snippets so the incentives are very sticky, and the circus goes on. It's kind of like an NPM dependency tree of martech SaaS vendors...
- MrJohz 3y ago
  It is when (a) that data collection takes up a significant amount of bandwidth whenever I visit your website, and (b) I don't trust that that data collection really is as anonymous as the website says (or even thinks). The major players here are explicitly not anonymous, they are designed to keep track of people over time so that they can collate habits and preferences across different sites to better target advertising. Yes, your AB test script isn't doing the same thing, but is it really adding any value to be as a consumer, or is it just optimising an extra 0.01% revenue for you?
- psychoslave 3y ago
  How should we feel if when we learn that due to technical constraints, Stasi wasn’t able to measure how successful it was?

tadfisher 3y ago

> Whats worse is some of them are fetched externally rather than bundled with the host code thus increasing latency and potential security risks Some vendor SDKs can be built and bundled from NPM, but most of them explicitly require you fetch their minified/obfuscated bundle from their CDN with a script tag. This is so they don't have to support older versions like most other software in the world, and so they can push updates without requiring customers to update their code. Try to use vendors that distribute open-source SDKs, if you have to use vendors.

willsmith72 3y ago

im pro privacy, but is it really so bad to get anonymous data about where people clicked and how long they stayed where? it would be almost impossible to measure success without it, whether it's a conversion funnel or tracking usage of a new feature

kevin_thibedeau 3y ago
That data can be gathered with self-hosted JS if the devs were allowed to implement it. The infatuation with third party analytics is just a more elaborate version of leftpad.
- ehnto 3y ago
  Marketing snippets are rarely implemented by devs, they get dropped into a text box or added to Google Tags by marketing/SEO peeps. If it is put in by a developer, the budget for that is like an hour to copy paste the code snippet in the right spot. Few are going to pay the hours required for an in house data collection layer that then has to integrate with the third party if that's even an option. At least that is my experience through agency work. Maybe a product owner company could do it. Not to be rude to the industry either, but I don't see why the assumption would bet that an in house dev has the chops to not make the same mistakes a third party does.
  - RugnirViking 3y ago
    its not about having the chops to do it well, its about not importing every feature under the sun just because you want to do intern's first marketing analytics campaign. earlier in the conversation someone talked about pasting a snippet. We're talking about the "chops" to not paste a snippet that is hundreds of thousands of lines long. A snippet so long it would crash many editors.
    - ehnto 3y ago
      Typically the person including the JS tag that then fetches the massive third party payload has no idea that's what is happening. It is very common to get multiple departments and contracted companies sticking their misc JS in since every marketing SaaS tool they use has it's own snippet. Your SEO guy wants 3 trackers, your marketing has another 5, and you sell on XYZ online market and they have affilliate trackers etc. No devs engaged at any point and the site performance isn't their responsibility. They can't do their job without their snippets so the incentives are very sticky, and the circus goes on. It's kind of like an NPM dependency tree of martech SaaS vendors...
MrJohz 3y ago
It is when (a) that data collection takes up a significant amount of bandwidth whenever I visit your website, and (b) I don't trust that that data collection really is as anonymous as the website says (or even thinks). The major players here are explicitly not anonymous, they are designed to keep track of people over time so that they can collate habits and preferences across different sites to better target advertising. Yes, your AB test script isn't doing the same thing, but is it really adding any value to be as a consumer, or is it just optimising an extra 0.01% revenue for you?
psychoslave 3y ago
How should we feel if when we learn that due to technical constraints, Stasi wasn’t able to measure how successful it was?