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Plausible Analytics: GDPR Compliance w/o Cookie Consent Banner
- jsheard 2y agoObligatory GoatCounter plug: https://www.goatcounter.com https://www.goatcounter.com It's also cookieless, the hosted version is free to use within reason, and it's extremely lightweight if you choose to self-host it. It doesn't even need a separate database, it can run self-contained with SQLite (or Postgres if you prefer). A good fit for small sites where the big industrial-grade solutions are overkill.
- Sephr 2y agoThis service claims to not track personal data, yet their docs admit to storing hash(siteID + User-Agent + IP) + seen_paths on their backend for session tracking.[1] Sites can track sessions without tracking personal data. 1. https://www.goatcounter.com/help/sessions https://www.goatcounter.com/help/sessions
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- justmedep 2y ago„ In comparison, in the context of the European GDPR, the Article 29 Working Party[6] considered hashing to be a technique for pseudonymization that “reduces the linkability of a dataset with the original identity of a data subject” and thus “is a useful security measure,” but is “not a method of anonymisation.”[7] In other words, from the perspective of the Article 29 Working Party, while hashing might be a useful security technique, it is not sufficient to convert personal data into deidentified data.“ https://www.gtlaw-dataprivacydish.com/2021/03/what-is-hashing-and-does-it-help-avoid-the-obligations-imposed-by-the-new-privacy-regulations/#:~:text=In%20comparison%2C%20in%20the%20context,anonymisation.%E2%80%9D%5B7%5D%20In https://www.gtlaw-dataprivacydish.com/2021/03/what-is-hashin...
- number6 2y agoI am a DPO. The claims Plausible makes won't hold up to scrutiny. It's a simple trick: declaring all data collected to technical data, when in fact it is linkable to a data subject. Thus collection of the data requires consent, because a subject is identified at least for the session. If you can identify unique visitors you are clearly identifying individuals.
- Symbiote 2y agohash(daily_salt + website_domain + ip_address + user_agent) That's what they do. Within 24 hours the daily salt is gone, and the data is anonymous. https://plausible.io/data-policy#how-we-count-unique-users-without-cookies https://plausible.io/data-policy#how-we-count-unique-users-w...
- number6 2y agoGood approach. IP Addresses are personal data. So the data and the hash is subject to GDPR. You still need consent to collect it - well or some other kind of legal shenanigans. The intent is to track a person, it is not technically necessary. You might have a legitimate interest - but in the end you still have to consider the GDPR to use this tool. https://europa.eu/youreurope/business/dealing-with-customers/data-protection/data-protection-gdpr/index_en.htm https://europa.eu/youreurope/business/dealing-with-customers...
- aspect0545 2y agoWhat’s your thought on the approach adjust.com takes? They say you can claim legitimate interest
- omnimus 2y agoTurns out that many officials believe this is fine. Companies using Plausible, Matomo and similar services have been under scrutiny. IP adress is required for site to function - your server cant not collect it. Plausible also only processes it for uniqueness and doesnt save it as is. Interestingly most webservers/firewalls will have to keep track of ip adresses so they will be saved in acess logs and caches. Making them more problematic than Plausible. Yet its most likely fine because the intent is not to track individual users but to improve service/keep it runing. Plausible intent is also not track individual users but collect visitor counts which is something used for improving service too. I think you might be prematurely spreading fear.
- inhumantsar 2y agoright below that the docs also say that this hash is not persisted, only cached in memory and mapped to a UUIDv4. The UUIDv4 is what persists between sessions. > The IP address and User-Agent are never stored to the database or disk, and there is no conceivable way to trace the random UUID back to this. > > It’s only stored in memory, which is needed anyway for basic networking to work. I can't say whether that is GPDR compliant but it's definitely not storing the hash
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- yunohn 2y ago> Sites can track sessions without tracking personal data. Could you detail how that would work?
- JimDabell 2y agoFetch an empty resource that is privately cacheable, set to max-age=0, and has an ETag containing the current timestamp and a random session id. The browser will consider its cached copy always stale. When you next fetch that resource, because it is stale, the browser will revalidate it by passing an If-None-Match header containing the ETag. Update the ETag to include the original timestamp and the current timestamp. So on every page load (or whichever other event you want to measure), you will be told when that session started, the session id and when that visitor was last seen. To set the maximum session duration, reset the ETag if the last seen timestamp passed to you in If-None-Match is too long ago. This can even work without JavaScript by using an img element. The only data tracked with this is the session start time, last seen time, and a random session id. Since the session id isn’t related to any of your business logic, it cannot be used to identify an individual. To further isolate this data, locate the tracking resource on a different hostname. The browser’s SOP will prevent any cookies from being sent with the request, so your analytics backend can’t record identifying information even if it wanted to. This will also prevent you from tracking which page is being visited, though you can override that with the no-referrer-when-downgrade referrer policy.
- stavros 2y agoWhy do all this when you can set a cookie with a random session ID?
- Tabular-Iceberg 2y agoThat's just a cookie. And then you're back to the annoying consent banners.
- yunohn 2y agoYou just reinvented analytics cookies. You’d be surprised, but they don’t store PII either. It’s usually just a randomized session ID and timestamps, like you’re suggesting.
- yreg 2y agoI like Umami: https://umami.is/ https://umami.is/
- LorenDB 2y agoCurrently using Umami, but I've considered switching to Plausible due to Umami's less-than-stellar development performance (e.g. breaking the site details page for a few days recently).
- qingcharles 2y agoI switched to Umami for now because the Plausible developers were totally disinterested in fixing bugs that silently dropped data. These are still JavaScript solutions, so if their JS code is broked then you just don't get the data. You end up with unknown unknowns. The only truly reliable data you can get is from your server logs, and obviously you are limited by whatever the browser gives you in the request.
- gerenuk 2y agoCheck out Usermaven.com.
- 8organicbits 2y agoAlso happily using hosted GoatCounter. Last year I noticed some occasional operational hiccups, like service brief downtime, but this year it's been completely stable as far as I can tell.
- D13Fd 2y agoI used to like simpleanalytics.com but their site has been very slow lately.
- kstrauser 2y agoPlausible is very nice, but it lacks much of the information from Matomo (like “after viewing /foo, visitors tend to view…”). Matomo is very nice, but it lacks the free Google Search Console integration (“people are currently finding you from these Google searches: …”) from Plausible.[0] I’m vain and curious enough to want to see the Google data, but not so much as to pay $160/yr for the Matomo plugin for my personal blog. [0] This isn’t the same as Google Analytics. You can get this information without installing a tracker on your site.
- jgalt212 2y agoyou can fill in this hole with Google Search Console. https://search.google.com/search-console/about https://search.google.com/search-console/about It's not perfect, but it is free.
- kstrauser 2y agoYeah, that’s what I do now. It’s not as convenient as having it integrated directly into the stats, but free sure beats $160 for my hobby blog.
- bugfactory 2y agoPlausible can fetch and show the used "search terms" if you connect it to your Google Search Console.
- kstrauser 2y agoRight, but Matomo can’t. Matomo has more information otherwise, but Plausible does that part well.
- Ameo 2y agoI'm a very happy self-hosted Plausible user for years now. Solid, simple, and easy to maintain.
- bugfactory 2y agoDid you use the hosted version, too? I wonder if it is possible to seamlessly switch between hosted and self-hosted.
- Ameo 2y agoI've not tried their hosted version no. I doubt that there would be a seamless way to switch between them since all the data lives in Clickhouse, but I could be wrong.
- dustedcodes 2y agoHow are you self hosting it? I find its requirements extremely heavy for a simple analytics solution. It requires a PostgreSQL and Clickhouse database. I don't find self hosting Clickhouse particularly easy. Wish they had an option to just use SQLite as an alternative.
- ayuhito 2y agoI completely agree that the self-hosting story for Plausible is overkill for most websites. So much so that I made my own that focuses on self-hostability using SQLite and DuckDB (no external dependencies, can run on a 256MB VM): https://github.com/medama-io/medama https://github.com/medama-io/medama
- dustedcodes 2y agoThis looks really nice, I am going to give it a try straight away!
- Ameo 2y agoI use the docker-compose setup they provide. There are only two containers iirc, Clickhouse and their web server. Stuck it behind a NGINX frontend and it works just fine.
- a1o 2y agoCan I use plausible in a desktop application? I would like to have an idea of exactly which versions of an open source desktop app I maintain are being actively used so I know what to pay attention and invest efforts as I would like my users to be constantly migrating forward - we do have like 20 years of backwards compatibility so we push things forward very slowly.
- ioseph 2y agoI don't see any reason why not: https://plausible.io/docs/events-api https://plausible.io/docs/events-api although you'd have to come up with your own user-agent
- clone1018 2y agoI was able to do it pretty easily with a mobile app, should be just as easy on desktop. You could even register custom “pages” for various parts of the desktop app. https://github.com/Glimesh/glimesh_app/blob/main/lib/track.dart https://github.com/Glimesh/glimesh_app/blob/main/lib/track.d...
- Nursie 2y agoCool. Perhaps companies and governments (gov.uk I'm looking at you) could consider using this stuff instead of forwarding all their public interactions to an unaccountable US corp.
- XCSme 2y agoOr better if they choose a self-hosted solution.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- ChrisArchitect 2y agoAnything new here with this editorialized title? Their most recent blog post: Things I hate about GA4 https://plausible.io/blog/things-i-hate-about-GA4 https://plausible.io/blog/things-i-hate-about-GA4 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40904139 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40904139)
- bugfactory 2y agoNo, nothing new. I recently discovered Plausible myself and was more than happy to delete a few Cookie Consent Banners. That's all ;)
- pdyc 2y agoLet me plugin my tool as well. Please give it a try https://easyanalytics.win/en https://easyanalytics.win/en IT does not requires cookie consent banner.
- Zaheer 2y agoWe use Plausible but have found it quite slow for our needs.
- newusertoday 2y agoCan you elaborate? how many views do you have per month.
- pdyc 2y agoinitial rendering is slow or filtering is slow? are you doing something special with it? what is your typical data size?
- theanonymousone 2y agoI was always confused by GDPR. What are the minimum requirements to avoid the banner? Anonymising the IPs and not keeping anything else, or you can keep anything as long as you don't share them with third-parties?
- blkhawk 2y agowell AFAIK a simple session cookie doesn't need a banner. Also i think if you do everything local to your system you don't need one either. The point where you need one if you use any system that utilizes third parties to track the user. So if you store and analyze everything "locally" to your server you don't need cookies and therefore no banner no matter how much you "track" since its all request made to your own server you merly use the telemetry of. You can't share that data without consent but thats a seperate data protection thing from the cookie banners.
- blkhawk 2y agoOh and the GPDR is mostly confusing because it was interpreted with malicous complyance by the whole industry - at least in effect if not intention. it is simply easy for upper management to take a "better safe than sorry" approach and by now the banners have reached a degree of dark pattern development that is horrifying in their relentlessness.
- yardstick 2y agoYup. What’s that? We need users consent for ad cookies? Ok let’s also make them consent to the session cookie too as a way to confuse them or get them to lazily just click the accept all cookies button rather than find the exact cookies the site needs to run without ads.
- omnimus 2y agoSo much this. The whole ad industry is afraid that most websites would switch to simpler more private compliant alternatives which would break their business (of reselling snooping data). So they are on marketing campaign to paint these alternatives as non compliant and requiring banners too. Basically every fart now needs a consent banner and when you already have a banner why not have this most invasive visitor screen recorder analytics that we send to our 743 partners in real time.
- shafyy 2y agoLet me also plug my free, open-source and self-hosted event-based analytics solution: Fugu (https://github.com/shafy/fugu https://github.com/shafy/fugu). Fugu does not track unique visitors (not even daily like Plausible does) and is made for event-based tracking. Comes with included Docker config to make it easy breezy to self-host.
- rickette 2y agoWhen you host your static site on Cloudflare Pages you'll also get Cloudflare Analytics which is cookieless.
- Smar 2y agoYou still need to ask permission for storing identification data, regardless whether user's browser is told to save cookies or not.
- iamacyborg 2y agoYep. The legislation has nothing to do with cookies, it’s about storage of unique identifiers. The actual method of storage is largely irrelevant.
- swores 2y agoFor GDPR yes, but there is also a separate and older EU regulation that is specifically about cookies (among other things). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPrivacy_Directive https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPrivacy_Directive
- iamacyborg 2y agoYep, I mentioned PECR in another comment here
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- jwr 2y agoSerious question: what is the value of web analytics for people? I run a SaaS business and I dropped Google Analytics a long, long time ago. Primarily because of the tracking, but also because I really couldn't see the value of the data. In the old days, you could at least use the "Referer" (sic) header to know where people came from and what they searched for. But that is long gone, and the only source of that data is Google/Bing search console. Page visits are a vanity metric: they tell me nothing about my business. The only thing that actually matters for a SaaS are signups and MRR. Measuring your business by page views is like measuring the business performance of a Walmart by counting cars on the freeway nearby. Yes, the numbers are somewhat related, but you can't draw any conclusions. I made it a point not to include any third-party JavaScript on my site, but even if I were to make an exception for these analytics, I can't really see the point, unless you are running an ad-driven site where pageviews are king.
- XCSme 2y agoSomething like this helps me a lot to understand if the visits I get are useful, and where to focus my marketing efforts: https://s3.amazonaws.com/i.snag.gy/cCdZa9.jpg https://s3.amazonaws.com/i.snag.gy/cCdZa9.jpg
- jonplackett 2y agoDo you not at least want to know page views ratio to sign ups so you can see conversion rate? Or do you have a different / better way to do things like testing a new design / price.
- vasco 2y agoThis seems contrarian just for contrarian sake, given how much literature there is about this, and the fact that it's almost self evident. Tracking impact of your changes, seeing if your users are getting lost after changing something, understanding where they spend the most time, etc. Say for example, if all your users start spending 30% more time in your reset password page after you pushed out some changes. How would you know? What could be causes of that? Could something be broken with the login? Apply this to everything. Not having analytics is literally not caring about what they do in your product, so you're either never changing the product and 100% confident it'll always work, or you're probably giving them a worse experience than you could. How you do this tracking is another story, but there's ethical ways to do it.
- pogue 2y agoI'm planning on running a small niche WordPress blog that I would like to monetize with adsense & possibly an affiliate program. I see there's a lot of choices for analytics available listed by users in this post. Does Adsense require Google Analytics or could I use one of these more privacy friendly ones?
- that_guy_iain 2y agoIm confused why you would care for a privacy friendly option when you‘re already willing to give Google all the data anyways.
- pogue 2y agoIs there a better option than adsense that pays out as well?
- NicuCalcea 2y agoAdSense and Google Analytics are two separate products, you can use either, both or neither. If you have AdSense though, you've already allowing Google to track your users, so I don't think ditching Analytics would make the blog any more private.
- ayuhito 2y agoObligatory plug for Medama, which focuses on easy self-hostability: https://github.com/medama-io/medama https://github.com/medama-io/medama I think Plausible’s self-hosting is not simple, requiring unnecessarily heavy databases like ClickHouse, which can be overkill for the average website owner. Comparatively, this project can effectively run on a 256MB VM for most small website with no external dependencies.
- phyzix5761 2y agoIn my opinion Cookie Consent Banners have made using the internet an overall worse experience.
- mediumsmart 2y agoI opened the site but would it be plausible for their analytics to tell them that Orion does not load the css? Safari does it without consent.