4 ms·

I don't get these "privacy" based tracking / analytics systems, it sounds like an oxymoron to me. These new ones preach they are better than Google Analytics (

I don't get these "privacy" based tracking / analytics systems, it sounds like an oxymoron to me. These new ones preach they are better than Google Analytics (also another evil tracking system) yet some how these ones still track you anyway and you're paying for analytics which is useless and you're punished for growing. It might be best to save money and not use any analytics system, it's just noise at this point. Am I missing something?

chpatrick 2y ago
This is for the owners of the site tracking their users (who have the logs anyway), as opposed to Google hoovering up information from the whole internet.
- colesantiago 2y ago
  I can see that this software has a SaaS version so I was referring to all privacy tracking software in general. So except for self hosting it doesn't seem that this is any different to GA.
  - Y-bar 2y ago
    We use it for a two main reasons: - Due to how the FISA (e.g. 702) laws in the USA are incompatible with GDPR, GA4 is illegal is much of EU (and EEA). - Plausible actually collects less data on the visitor, making it more ethically sound.
  - chpatrick 2y ago
    Self hosting is the whole point of this.
rkwz 2y ago
> I don't get these "privacy" based tracking / analytics systems, it sounds like an oxymoron to me. Not really oxymoron if they don't track your PII like IP address, email etc. Don't know how Plausible works, but usually these systems track page views, etc without the associated visitors' data. They either anonymize the visitor metadata or just aggregate the site data like what urls are visited, etc.
simonw 2y ago
What do you mean when you say they "still track you anyway"? They don't set cookies. They're effectively the same level of tracking as a web server log file... except Plausible don't even collect and store IPs (unlike the server log). That feels very different from cookie-based analytics platforms like Google Analytics. More in their docs here: https://plausible.io/vs-google-analytics https://plausible.io/vs-google-analytics
sofixa 2y ago
> yet some how these ones still track you anyway There is tracking and tracking. Google Analytics tracks you across the internet and collects all sorts of private and public user data and metadata, analyses behaviour, correlates with other metrics and sources of information (like ad campaigns), etc. Plausible and co tell you there were X users with an average of 30s spent on page Z. Which Google Analytics also does, on top of the other things. Yes, it's technically "tracking", but if you thing it has much to do with the first one you're fundamentally misunderstanding analytics and tracking and thinking in FUD terms.
dr_kiszonka 2y ago
AFAIK, Google takes advantage of the signals collected using GA (or did), and you might not want to surrender this information to them. (Sure, most people use Chrome so Google gets some of these signals anyway, but that is not something that you can control.)

chpatrick 2y ago

This is for the owners of the site tracking their users (who have the logs anyway), as opposed to Google hoovering up information from the whole internet.

colesantiago 2y ago
I can see that this software has a SaaS version so I was referring to all privacy tracking software in general. So except for self hosting it doesn't seem that this is any different to GA.
- Y-bar 2y ago
  We use it for a two main reasons: - Due to how the FISA (e.g. 702) laws in the USA are incompatible with GDPR, GA4 is illegal is much of EU (and EEA). - Plausible actually collects less data on the visitor, making it more ethically sound.
- chpatrick 2y ago
  Self hosting is the whole point of this.

rkwz 2y ago

> I don't get these "privacy" based tracking / analytics systems, it sounds like an oxymoron to me. Not really oxymoron if they don't track your PII like IP address, email etc. Don't know how Plausible works, but usually these systems track page views, etc without the associated visitors' data. They either anonymize the visitor metadata or just aggregate the site data like what urls are visited, etc.

simonw 2y ago

What do you mean when you say they "still track you anyway"? They don't set cookies. They're effectively the same level of tracking as a web server log file... except Plausible don't even collect and store IPs (unlike the server log). That feels very different from cookie-based analytics platforms like Google Analytics. More in their docs here: https://plausible.io/vs-google-analytics https://plausible.io/vs-google-analytics

sofixa 2y ago

> yet some how these ones still track you anyway There is tracking and tracking. Google Analytics tracks you across the internet and collects all sorts of private and public user data and metadata, analyses behaviour, correlates with other metrics and sources of information (like ad campaigns), etc. Plausible and co tell you there were X users with an average of 30s spent on page Z. Which Google Analytics also does, on top of the other things. Yes, it's technically "tracking", but if you thing it has much to do with the first one you're fundamentally misunderstanding analytics and tracking and thinking in FUD terms.

dr_kiszonka 2y ago

AFAIK, Google takes advantage of the signals collected using GA (or did), and you might not want to surrender this information to them. (Sure, most people use Chrome so Google gets some of these signals anyway, but that is not something that you can control.)