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I can't believe these clowns are still using Google Analytics. Who the hell thinks that an advertising corporation in a foreign country that has no privacy regu

I can't believe these clowns are still using Google Analytics. Who the hell thinks that an advertising corporation in a foreign country that has no privacy regulations should be profiling and tracking my activity when I interact with my government. That includes interactions like registering to vote, 'anonymously' reporting crimes[1], applying for a passport[2] or driving licence[3]. Thankfully the gov.uk hipsters haven't got to the inland revenue sites so at least Google doesn't know my tax details. Yet. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6985916 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6985916 [2] https://www.gov.uk/apply-renew-passport https://www.gov.uk/apply-renew-passport [3] https://www.gov.uk/apply-first-provisional-driving-licence https://www.gov.uk/apply-first-provisional-driving-licence

ihuman 12y ago
Do you have a UK-based, secure, and trustworthy alternative?
- pdkl95 12y ago
  Apache/NGINX logs. Like we used to do before everybody decided to "outsource" that task. Hosting service doesn't provide access to the log files? Get a better hosting service, as that used to be a fairly standard feature. CDN or caching proxy doesn't give you the log files (or at least summarized stats)? Start demanding they provide that feature, or switch to a different service/vendor. Existing log parsers are missing some type of statistical analysis that Google provided? Option 1: Do you really need that feature, or is it simply "cool" or "might be useful"? Option 2: write it yourself; doing stats on log files isn't particularly hard. I never understood why everybody was so quick to give Google such massive amounts of valuable data in exchange for something as trivial as a log parser and a few gnuplot charts. None of this needs as 3rd party. Besides: why do you assume that the analysis provided by google-analytics is accurate? A lot of us block {,www.,ssl.}google-analytics.com and are not included. You cannot opt-out of the apache log and still get the page.

ihuman 12y ago

Do you have a UK-based, secure, and trustworthy alternative?

pdkl95 12y ago
Apache/NGINX logs. Like we used to do before everybody decided to "outsource" that task. Hosting service doesn't provide access to the log files? Get a better hosting service, as that used to be a fairly standard feature. CDN or caching proxy doesn't give you the log files (or at least summarized stats)? Start demanding they provide that feature, or switch to a different service/vendor. Existing log parsers are missing some type of statistical analysis that Google provided? Option 1: Do you really need that feature, or is it simply "cool" or "might be useful"? Option 2: write it yourself; doing stats on log files isn't particularly hard. I never understood why everybody was so quick to give Google such massive amounts of valuable data in exchange for something as trivial as a log parser and a few gnuplot charts. None of this needs as 3rd party. Besides: why do you assume that the analysis provided by google-analytics is accurate? A lot of us block {,www.,ssl.}google-analytics.com and are not included. You cannot opt-out of the apache log and still get the page.