(at least for me) Considering the value of their service, GA on their marketing page seems like a very small compromise. If you don't like it you are free to block it - hell, they literally provide a service to do so.
Which is why everyone uses it and we just sit back and accept the consequences. You can't be expected to be taken seriously if you simultaneously argue that other's shouldn't do something while yourself use it for precisely the same reasons everyone else does.
BTW, in a number of countries a large percentage of doctors smoke. It's a cultural thing: They pick up the habit during the stress of medical school. Would you suggest that a large percentage of doctors in those countries not inform patients that smoking is bad for them?
As a politician recently complained about: Purity tests are usually a bad idea.
It's fair to criticize. It's silly to reject their word/work because of it.
It's a lot more like if all doctors were telling each other they should wash their hands before surgery, but many of them don't really because the tap water is cold and kinda too far away and everybody is doing it and what's the harm really and at least I'm not actively sneezing into the wound, you know?
For more reasons why (some/small) compromises should be allowed and not considered completely against the core value, see religious extremism.
I don't even consider it a compromise, because literally no one arguing to use GA anyway seems to be able to present both sides of the scale considering the compromise.
In comparison here this company is giving out all their user's browsing data to a huge advertising company without the user's explicit consent.
Doesn't mean she can't clean my teeth and drill holes in my skull or whatever with high proficiency.
You don't get that from server logs.
Sound like you're not arguing against Matomo but arguing that you really in fact do want to share data with a third party to extract information that your users very much did not consent to.
It's terrifying what comes out of the wood works sometimes.
It's indicative of a lack of respect for their users.
> GA provides objectively superior data and they probably get a lot of value from it
That's certainly true. Also, that's orthogonal to the point. Being very valuable to website operators doesn't make its use any more acceptable to others.
It's not a compromise until you consider the value of both sides of the equation. Please do elaborate on that, with some details on the negative externalities of blindly sharing your tracking data with Google.
Otherwise your argument just became "superior data has got some value to me, which is more than none, so yeah I got mine".
It's not less of an all-or-nothing attitude if you fail to seriously consider the other side of the supposed compromise.
I had a very niche ecommerce site for a couple of years, for ease I was only shipping to U.S. customers. I noticed that something like 20% of my traffic was coming from Canada so I decided to enable shipping to Canada but added a 5$ premium on top of the actual shipping cost. I had a sale to Canada the first hour of enabling it in my cart and Canada ended up being roughly 10% of my orders, even after I raised the premium/handling fee to 10$.
Looking at my GA page once caused more money to be going into my pocket and filled a need for Canadian customers. I didn't need to learn a programming language or spend tens of hours trying to figure out, through articles, how to copy paste a bunch of code together to recreate something comparable.
I needed a vegetable knife recently. I could have (and I do have the skills, and have made many knives over the past 25 years) purchased some appropriate steel and made one myself in 3-5 hours and had it incredibly sharp but I opted to buy a Mercer stainless steel one on Amazon for 20$~ because it required much less effort.
I also couldn't care less about Google or the NSA or Lectroids from another dimension tracking me so I don't rush to go "I'd better cater to the small percentage of my potential customers that want to leave zero trace on the internet, there are countless tools out there they can use to minimize that trail of breadcrumbs. This data is usable to me and Google makes it easy" and I imagine, even the company in question was like "some people want privacy but those that are concerned can easily block this with a browser extension, in their hosts file, and/or at a hardware level so we'll go ahead and use it and save a bunch of time".
Imagine if restaurants had this attitude about hygiene.
I mean not everybody is a professional cleaner ninja or has money to hire them. Just wiping the counter a little is all everybody sees anyway, and everybody can do it.
If you're simply not skilled to do it properly, does that mean you get to earn the profit of doing it over your customer's backs anyway?
Your attitude really reminds me of, say, street food carts in some places. Because some of people just didn't receive food hygiene training, and they only have to get out there with a cart and something that looks edible.
In this case would you also say it's OK to be stealing in stores because it's cheaper than getting things the correct way by paying for them, and that stores concerned about theft should just do a better job at preventing you from stealing by using the real-life-equivalent of a hosts file to prevent you from entering the store?
"Don't track me!"
I can't, you are blocking it
"You shouldn't be tracking me!"
I'm not holding a gun to their head and telling them to visit my site. If I walk into a business, or someone's house, I assume I'm being monitored. Websites are the same thing.
And I'm not threatening to skin you alive if you don't stop it.
How are threats of violence okay again?
Tens of hours, people. THIS is what your privacy is worth to some.
You forget that, while doing the unethical thing might seem a lot less hard, simply NOT doing the thing is also not hard at all! So that's not an excuse.
You seem to think you have a right to the earnings of the difference between those two, over the backs of your visitors' privacy.
THAT is the argument you have to explain. Not the part of how you managed to get fancy analytics for free by selling out your visitors.
If you want more privacy then build a better GA (from the typical end user perspective, recall the famous comment here that no one will use Dropbox because they can instead just run some Unix commands).
I am not sure what would be a good replacement for Google Analytics these days but I had an absolutely terrible time with WebTrends and server-side logs. I was pretty doubtful about the results produced, as well.
Stuff like GA you can copy paste an identifier or line of code, make it live and you're done. You now have a bookmark you can go to and see lots of actionable data in a nice visual form.
Most people don't care about a website tracking their OS/location/time spent on change etc so why would I, or someone else, put a bunch of extra work into fashioning something from scratch when there's a perfectly usable product that takes seconds to deploy and is easily blocked by those that don't want you to easily access that information about them?
If you need a knife most people would buy a knife. They would not buy a length of steel, cut it to rough shape, file or grind it down to the final shape, then spend an hour or more putting an edge on it with wet stones. Besides, the people that don't want tracked by Google are probably already blocking google via software and/or hardware solutions.
All of those things can be determined by using a web server log analyzer.
Or server logs, if they really must.
Sure, you can't get the exact same information, but you can get enough to do capacity planning and some basic stats.
I've started to wonder why people care about Google Analytics, what does it tell you that you actually need to know. Again capacity planning is useful, but other than that, isn't sort of pointless?
you could actually get more from plain old log parsing in some cases. First of all with GA you can't access the raw data. With logs you can create new type of stats/metrics/charts and apply them on past data. Also, IIRC GA uses random sampling - only a % of connections are recorded and the data being shown is extrapolated from those samples. While I'm not arguing that given the vast amount of data at disposal, huge capacity and great engineers they can make those extrapolations very accurate, I'm not entirely convinced it is precise for (very) small traffic websites. And since a small traffic logging requires both small storage space and small processing capacity the resources needed for keeping and processing your own logs are insignificant while the results might be useful.
Sure you can setup and run your own site and CMS easily enough, but running even hourly bulk log ingestion is usually not as straight forward and the information you can derive is very limited comparative to js based tracking.
Matamo ( formerly Piwik) is decent but still takes some time to setup and get right.
The main thing that the analytics tells you if you are promoting anything, is which of those promotions is actually working and driving visitors to your site.
I don't think it's unreasonable to require them to provide you some sort in insight into your traffic data in that case.
You can to promotion tracking with just log parsing, depending on how your system is built. There's a large number of sites that handle that by simply having unique URL for each promotional partner.
Have you actually used Google Analytics? Doesn't sound like it.
First, being able to get stats on real traffic and not bots/crawlers is very important and GA does an excellent job of this.
Google Analytics also allows you to see how people actually use your site. Stats like how long, what their visit path looks like, and when they leave your site. It also lets you see demographic info, like age group and gender.
I've only touched the surface of what GA does. Yes, it is equally frightening and amazing how it tracks users.
Good luck doing these with your server logs.
Yep, and lots of us still do. I wouldn't feel right throwing my users under the bus by subjecting them to GA.
Piwik, GoatCounter, GoAccess, Open Web Analytics, clicky, Snowplow, Gauges, etc.
The correct solution is to self-host all analytics involving data that can be used to identify, track, or analyze individuals.
everybody, this is what your privacy is worth to some people.