If Firefox becomes the bastion of privacy sensitive people it will become more and more like Tor users, all tainted with the same labels. I mean it's already the case that recaptcha will more likely trigger on Firefox than Chrome, asking for multiple rounds of checks. Like visitors existing Tor exit nodes, in a bit less worse.
It's not, the Internet is the only medium where it's assumed that tracking/targeting is necessary for advertising. TV, Magazines, radio, podcasts, cinema don't track users.
When I download a few different podcasts, I get an mp3 with targeted ads inserted in it, and they're presumably connecting IP geolocation info.
But if something like this happens, I will be happy to build/use an extension for the other browsers that makes such websites invisible in all major social networks.
He never said anything about blocking, here his exact quote about the retaliation:
> Why spend money optimizing for a browser that doesn't generate revenue?
Nobody ever optimized for a browser that had the Google toolbar installed. It's hard to stop doing something you never did.
As the other parent comment said, it will happens naturally by the mere fact that theses users won't appears on statistics. For sure it will depends on the developers, and many of them will either use Firefox directly, or simply care enough about their craft to optimize for most of the browsers even though they don't appear on stats.
Maybe sites will move to a model that you'll be offered to pay for their services if you block trackers. So you'll have a choice of paying with your data or paying with your money.
Either way someone has to foot the bill at the end. I guess in this case most users will let trackers work instead of paying.
Perhaps if we consider information on the internet to be vital to daily life, a program like food stamps could be implemented? It sounds rather over engineered but it's the only idea I've ever heard for working around the "privacy is only for the wealthy" concern.
A browser dedicated to websites that exists for reasons other than serving ads? Sign me up!
Google Analytics isn't the only analytics tool and as blockers have become more prevalent relying on GA as your sole source of truth is becoming increasingly desperate to worship Google. Ideally you run a simple analytics tool alongside that is lightweight and doesn't get blocked (ie, privacy friendly) as well as running a log analyzer on your apache/webserver logs.
They don't provide a lot of demographic information (even browser used, afaik) but provide sufficient information for my purpose.
edit: I should mention that this a paid feature ($9 a month).
edit2: I do notice a higher number of traffic when compared to some free analytics which work on the client side, and respect Do Not Track.
Apparently not, as one other comment on this site lists one of the apparent benefits of using cloudflare as that they provide "the exact numbers on how many people requested or visited my site"
I think we need to nail down what we mean by unique visitors -- we're talking about an estimation which pools from many different sources to calculate as best we can the number of different real human visitors. There is good data in the server logs but if that's your only source of data then your estimation is going to be coarse.
This can be good enough for certain applications, and is plenty for sites with simple access models but you do lose information compared to what you get from client-side tracking.
Nope. It blew my mind as well. I used to work for a company that spent about 70 million per quarter on advertising and they most certainly wanted every .. last .. access log .. line. They would scrutinize the way I did log rotation to ensure nothing was lost.
At my current gig, the web marketing team didn't even know what access logs were. I don't think they left out a single tracker on the site.
The only self-hosted one I can find that has a funnel feature is Matomo.
Log parsing is an option. There are self hosted options. There are also services like https://simpleanalytics.com/ (I have not used them or know much about them tbh).
Personally, on my recent projects I start without analytics. If I want to measure health or growth, I define my own "metrics" and use sql or logs to generate. I don't need to know what country you are in. I don't need to know what browser you are using. If I do need to know something, I can look at useragents. If it truly is for user benefit and not just my curiosity, I can actually ask my users with a survey.
And if you obfuscate your Matomo client script to get around the user's preference for trackers you're not being very ethical.
I'm not sure I agree, but you made interesting point and I'm glad you brought it up!
Personally, I don't think I would classify that as unethical. Ethics need to be looked at with intent in mind, and if you are comfortable being honest about what you are doing, I _think_ I would be okay with this. Not sure, though–I do have doubt.
Theoretically you could use the same way to feed third-party analytics too though.
Even without cookies and without JS you can still get some data for analytics.
A fair share of that is probably because GA is much better at identifying the same user across multiple browsers / devices. If they identify two browsers as the same person on site A, they can know they're the same person on site B, even if site B on its own doesn't have enough to figure it out (so piwik can't know it).
It will take some time for people to adapt to server side analytics since a lot of places won't have that solution in place. Or more specifically a solution in place that overlaps with what client side analytics is meant to be providing already (they may have other server side analytics, like performance and hits).