I don't care about server-side analytics. They can keep my IP, user agent, what pages I visit, etc - I give them those details willingly.

What I do care about and actively block is JavaScript trying to enumerate fonts or fingerprint my canvas or whatever is the latest and greatest web API abuse for fingerprinting.

I don't care about one web site doing their analytics. It becomes a problem when one analytics company is building a profile across many sites.

Unfortunately, Cloudflare is in a position to do just that, just like major analytics providers.

Cloudflare doesn't make their money by selling user data to advertisers - I'll start worrying when they do, or Google starts doing this.

I mean, it's pretty clear they're gonna be able to do this very easily once cf analytics becomes widely adopted.

Maybe not yet, but the simple fact, that there even is a Cloudflare "analytics", hints at a direction, in which this will probably develop. Some people inside Cloudflare will think "If only we could sell our analytics data, we could profit more!" and then they might just do that. The temptation is huge for them. Lets be realistic. They are not all idealistic developers at Cloudflare. It is a huge business with lots of unethical people working at it, like in many big businesses. At some point some internal pressure might overwhelm a minority fighting against it and the change will happen. Perhaps it will happen step by step, slowly boiling the frog.

FULL STOP: Cloudflare Analytics sells their data to Teradata.

https://www.teradata.com/Resources/White-Papers/Price-Perfor...

Uh, no.

[Counter-]Citation, please.

I am Cloudflare's CTO.

then you probably may want to talk to your marketing branch, you know, before you may get caught with your pants down … at something like a congressional hearing … or something.

What has that Teradata whitepaper got to do with Cloudflare?

I agree, the problem is not each site storing stats about their visitors, it's one site storing stats about all the visitors across many websites.

If any network gets significant market share (like Google or Cloudflare), they can probably still follow you around by correlation of IP, user agent, routing location etc.

I think there's some confusion about what Google Analytics does. It doesn't really engage in browser fingerprinting. It only tracks down to the individual session.

Is that what they're slurping?

Or just what they're showing you?

I work in marketing systems administration. I've had access to over a dozen GA implementations, some for Fortune 500 companies.

It doesn't remotely do what people in this thread seems to think it does. Which is bizarre given you can go set up an account for free and see for yourself.

They seem to be confusing it with some of the third party ad tracking software. But GA is really dumb as a brick (and that's a feature, not a bug).

> I've had access to over a dozen GA implementations, some for Fortune 500 companies.

The concern isn't about what GA gives to its implementers, it's about what it collects internally.

Google is an advertising company and has a financial incentive to stalk everyone. Their bad faith implementation of the GDPR consent flow (which IMO does not actually comply, but the regulators are incompetent or unwilling to enforce the law) proves it. The current regulatory environment doesn't do enough to discourage non-consensual data collection, so given this fact and the company's past history we need to assume the worst until proven otherwise.

They can keep GA dumb as cover and do their dirty work with tag manager or fonts.

If you have a static IP (afaik, I do) it can be used for fingerprinting.

> I often wonder how many people block analytics, since it's the default AFAIK in uBlock Origin. For HN it must be the majority.

I went to visit a friend a few days ago. At some point she wanted to show me something on YouTube on her laptop. While staring surprised at the screen, I asked, "What is this? Is it what you wanted to show me?" She was as surprised as me, "No, of course not, this is just an ad." It felt very strange to me as I haven't seen an ad on YouTube for many years.

So I inquired, "You know adblockers exist, why do you put up with this crap?" She answered, "Yes, sometimes people tell me this, then I install it, and then something breaks, like YouTube layout or the comments don't load etc., so I uninstall it, this happens every few years."

So this gave me some insight why a non-technical person may choose not to use an adblocker. I fixed it for her and I hope she enjoys smooth experience for a few months.

I've heard variants of this story so many times, but it leaves me confused over my own experience. This sort of high frequency breakage just does not happen for me, I can't even say rarely. Definitely not on youtube. So what is going on there?

It happened to me when I enabled some of the optional annoyances filter lists in uBlock Origin. Things like sign-up pages not working, full-page cookie modals you can't quit etc.

Some people like clicking on Google shopping links etc.

I would prefer comments not loader over ads loading.

Although they're still not the highest grade comments on the internet I have noticed a marked improvement in Youtube comments over the last 5 years. I'm not sure what Youtube changed but it's definitely working. However they're still utterly toxic in some circles (eg, anything gaming related).

In fact, even if the ads do load, I’d prefer that the comments don’t.

Don't you come to YouTube for the comments? ;)

I didn't meant to say that YouTube comments are bad, I meant to say that some websites breaking is still better than having Ads.

I work in marketing. For general audience it might be something like 3% of users have a tracking blocker, and specifically for developers it's something like 30%.

It actually becomes a bit of an issue when some idiot somewhere designs a business process around client side tracking. I'm currently fixing a broken process with a client where their users can request an upgrade, and ~1/3 of them (the technical users from above) never even process because some yuckster built it all inside of the tracker.

Any idea about lightweight OSS alternatives to Cloudflare Web Analytics?

I don't need the information Google Analytics provides and want to avoid 3rd party cookies - something like Cloudflare Analytics looks appealing, but I'd prefer an OSS, self-hosted solution.

Plausible is a good candidate for lightweight analytics

https://github.com/plausible/analytics