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by WorkLifeBalance 2910 days ago
I'd be wary of using a service built by a company (Gradient Ltd) that among other things provides, "Effective Attribution, Web Tracking, Analytical Insights".

From https://www.gradient.co/#products (scroll down 1 section).

"Attribution and identity stitching of users across multiple channels is complex and confusing – we provide a platform that does it all in one place."

"With Kintra you can prove how effective a social campaign was and visualise the full customer journey down to an identifiable individual – simple."
4 comments
jlogsdon 2909 days ago
From their Privacy Policy (https://www.gurn.io/privacy-policy/):

  4. We may collect the following Data, which includes personal Data, from you:
    ....
    l. A list of URLs starting with a referring site, your activity on the Website,
       and the site you exit to (automatically collected);
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sgmccli 2909 days ago
Hi jlogsdon,

This clause exists as we run Google Analytics on the main gurn.io webpage. It was a standard clause suggested by our lawyers here in the UK to ensure our users are fully informed about the possible data collection being conducted by the GA analytics.js tracking code.

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skratlo 2910 days ago
Oh hey, another data collecting/selling/trading "useful" thingy, go head everyone! Give up your privacy now!
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nihil75 2910 days ago
oh snap! should have read the comments before installing..
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sgmccli 2909 days ago
Hi WorkLifeBalance,

I'm one of the founders of Gradient, the company behind Gurn. I wanted to address this one personally.

First and foremost, Kintra was a completely separate product to Gurn and the products are unrelated in any way. I appreciate how the description of Kintra can be interpreted but let me try and describe it's purpose and see if I can alleviate your concerns.

It was built to address a problem for marketers who were unable to attribute marketing spend and return on investment effectively, in addition to facing the advancing GDPR legislation and the right to be forgotten. At the time, many marketers were using custom events in Google Analytics to track the source of a lead. Due to the walled garden nature of the likes of Twitter Ads / Facebook Ads / Google Ads it can be incredibly difficult to work out which channel is driving a sale when

a) every channel is claiming the sale

and

b) you have no concept of an individual

In addition, without knowing the individual (using an anonymous identifier in a cookie) how you would be able to remove all the data for that individual should a request be served under GDPR? In Google Analytics, due to the way it aggregated its data in order to forget someone, there was the real risk you would need to delete the entire aggregated block of data with many potentially large numbers of user analytics rolled up together. Kintra was built to try and fit this need and is more akin to https://snowplowanalytics.com/ or https://piwik.pro/ solution built with the goal of helping a business understand how effectively they were spending money on social platforms whilst also supporting GDPR and the right to remove an individual's data at their request.

It was designed to be deployed by a client on their own equipment and used only across their own sites, not a large hosted data collection/aggregation platform like Google Analytics that presents one set of data to you about your users but effectively understands how nearly everyone is moving around the internet. We deployed the product to a single client and had no access to the data (as it was self-hosted) and no intent to sell data. As of writing, Kintra has been mothballed whilst we focus on Gurn (lack of focus is the death of startups!) and we can understand the true impact of the GDPR on the web analytics market.

We take our users data and it's security very seriously. With respect to Gurn we only ever interact with your browser when you initiate the software by opening the extension and explicitly performing an action in the UI such as adding a keyword, or when you type 'go' into the address bar. Our business model is driven by generating revenue from teams and larger organisations to enable the provision of a limited free tier for individuals.

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