[pixelbath]

I see a lot of suggestions for free or open-source analytics packages, but I would refrain from recommending anything you haven't personally used.

I've tried to separate myself from Google in various ways, and one of those was to replace Google Analytics with open source software. I tried several; they're all either non-functional out of the box, or require significant time investment to even start approaching Google Analytics.

After losing about a month of stats (which matters when you're also running AdSense), I ended up going back to Google. It took the same amount of time to set up as when I initially set it up: around 2 minutes of adding the tracking code and uploading it.

[fiddlerwoaroof]

I’ve used Piwik (Matomo) and the open source version seems to work pretty well, but I’ve never had any particularly sophisticated use cases.

[divbzero]

I also use open source Matomo [1] self-hosted with a simple LEMP stack but there is also a hosted option [2].

[1]: https://matomo.org/docs/installation "Installing Matomo On-Premise"

[2]: https://matomo.org/pricing/ "Matomo Pricing"

[sdan]

I'm building an analytics service and thank you for the feedback! I'm currently building a service that's nearly as fast as Google Analytics and simple as can be (although there's going to be a tone of new features soon).

Here's the link: https://sdan.io/pingpong. If you want to signup/give feed back, I would greatly appreciate if you do so:https://forms.gle/MhojBWWfdiWjZatC7 !

[amenod]

This caught my eye:

https://storage.googleapis.com/pingponganalytics/pingone.js

So... I should install a script that loads from Google servers?

Apart from that, you probably don't want to tie yourself to google like that. Once the users have this in their pages they will _never_ update it. You should use your own domain.

[sdan]

Yes. You're absolutely right. I'm just hacking stuff together right now (and recently moved every single piece of infra onto a local server from GCP). I'm still in that migration process.

[tripzilch]

> I tried several; they're all either non-functional out of the box, or require significant time investment to even start approaching Google Analytics.

It's almost as if you need to be a software engineer and do actual software engineering, to responsibly use tools like analytics.

> I ended up going back to Google. It took the same amount of time to set up as when I initially set it up: around 2 minutes of adding the tracking code and uploading it.

So how much effort is the privacy of your visitors worth, then?

It sounds like deep down you know the right thing to do, which is a lot of work, but seeing everybody (in your bubble of technical peers) just as easily use Google Analytics, makes you feel like you're owed the difference to these profits.

Maybe there shouldn't be a 2-minute turnkey solution to analytics, because even if it's self-hosted, your next excuse is going to be that it requires a significant time effort to keep it secure and act responsibly with the data.

[Carpetsmoker]

> require significant time investment to even start approaching Google Analytics.

I think that for a lot of the "alternative" analytics tools, feature parity with Google Analytics isn't necessarily a goal, so this may explain your disappointment. I think the only exception here is Matomo, which is the only "advanced" OSS analytics as far as I know.

[SkyBelow]

That's swell and all, but you are going to find businesses still going to Google Analytics because it is easy to setup and free. The cost to consumers by having their data shared everywhere isn't even thought on the horizon.

[Carpetsmoker]

I'm not ever sure how that comment even relates to mine. I just explained the goals of various OSS project as I understand them. I never said anything about setup costs or price.

[tripzilch]

They mean that people are going to make excuses regardless, because you get more features for less time, never mind the consequences.

It's people that struggle with the conundrum: "X, Y, or ethical. Pick two".

[lern_too_spel]

If you're using AdSense, you're already giving Google your visitor data, no matter what visitor analytics package you use.

[misterbwong]

If you're using AdSense, you're already -selling- Google your visitor data, no matter what visitor analytics package you use.

FTFY

[pixelbath]

> I've tried to separate myself from Google in various ways

I'm aware of this. The next logical step is to find a better ad network.

[jka]

Please also bear in mind that any developer's personal time (whether your own or someone else's), while important and valuable - is also a trade-off against the aggregated time and value of your users' privacy.

[shadowgovt]

... which, if users actually valued, they'd signal by ceasing to use one's site.

There is basically no strong indication right now of any large segment of users boycotting sites because the users care about privacy. There's the same small amount that have always been present and the number doesn't appear to be growing.

[drdeca]

It seems to me like a person could care about “these n people lacking privacy in this way” more than n times as much as they would care about any one of them marginally gaining or losing privacy in that way?

Or, idk if that is quite the right formulation for what I mean.

But, at the least, it seems likely that some people will sometimes be willing to take an amount of effort to protect the privacy of a large number of people, when they wouldn’t take that same amount of effort to just protect their own to the same degree.

It seems likely to me that a major impact of lack of privacy comes from many people lacking privacy, in ways that wouldn’t happen if it were only a few lacking it, and also where a few re-gaining it doesn’t influence the impact all that much.

If so, then people not avoiding something because of privacy concerns in sufficient numbers to substantially influence the amount of use, doesn’t seem to entirely rule out that they care about privacy. Perhaps their behavior could be attributed to a collective action problem, where they each would prefer that all of them avoid it, but don’t find it worthwhile to be among only a small number of people avoiding it.