Google Analytics is very hard to replace, because the real value to businesses is in the integrations with Google Ads and Search Console. There's no viable alternative to Google's advertising networks at the minute.

This. We use a non-Google analytics product that we could even move to self-hosting if needed. But the marketing director basically was like “This is better than GA, and I will use it for almost everything, but we have to have GA also because it shows as conversions.”

Which non-Google analytics product are you using?

FriendlyCaptcha will probably get a ton of new business. It's what some EU institutions themselves use.

I sure hope so

The directory linked in the article actually contains a captcha service called FriendlyCaptcha: https://www.developedin.eu/item-detail?recordId=recG9DsaUnGd...

From a first look it seems like the subscription requires to use that service in a EU-only fashion costs at least 200$. While this seems like a good option for large and medium size companies, I fear that this pricing leaves out all small companies that may not require 50k solved captchas a month but may require EU-based hosting nonetheless.

And the more this happens, the worse the search results will get because measuring popularity of a link and time spent on a website needs to be measured for ranking purposes, next time someone used the same search term.

Google search seemed to work fine before that stuff was tracked.

That's because way less people were trying to game it.

And because websites used to link to other websites for non-profitable reasons (blogs, directories, and webrings).

*according to Google.

I spend 5 minutes on american recipe websites to scroll through the SEO bullshit before finding the actual recipe, but that doesn't mean it's useful.

So, no, it's just Google telling you to let them collect analytics on every aspect of your life for "search improvement purposes".

also the worse the search results will get if someone put a bunch of ads in before the search results for people to click on instead of the search results.

Or things like Stripe’s anti fraud js script.

And GCP.

https://www.hcaptcha.com/ is a drop-in replacement for recaptcha.

It's not EU based, but at least it's not Google, and the service is privacy oriented...

It's run by Intuition Machines, Inc. which seems to be incorporated in California. That fact alone disqualifies it.

Actually, no. hCaptcha has always been very privacy-focused, so in this case there are technical safeguards available: enterprise customers can pre-blind all data on their end, meaning hCaptcha gets no PII at all.

(disclosure: work there)

If y’all write a blog post about how your preblinding option makes you GDPR-compliant for silent embedding even though you’re a US entity, that would be front page material right now.