[JackWritesCode]

> I think self-hosting is the solution. This way, there is no company that will store centralized user data, which is the biggest privacy issue for analytics.

Your opinion will change in time. It all comes down to the principles of the company and who has control of it. That's why Fathom hasn't taken venture capital. As soon as you bring in people who don't share the same values as you, things start going downhill. You do not need to store centralized user data to run a sustainable competitor to Google Analytics

[XCSme]

I am slightly confused by your comment. Why do you say my opiniong will change in time? It has been the same over 8 years now and it just seems to get stronger and stronger.

"You do not need to store centralized user data to run a sustainable competitor to Google Analytics." That was exactly my point, right? Any platform that is hosted stores centralized user data (as they control all the servers), so self-hosting is the only way to decentralize the data. Am I missing anything?

[JackWritesCode]

You replied to a comment talking about:

> Fathom, SimpleAnalytics.com, Plausible.io, Matomo.org, GoatCounter.com, and (shameless plug but WIP) Chiffre.io

and you said :

> I think self-hosting is the solution. This way, there is no company that will store centralized user data, which is the biggest privacy issue for analytics.".

Your premise was that these companies store centralized user data. That is absolutely not true. So you presented a fake problem (that doesn't exist amongst privacy-focused analytics solutions) and gave a solution.

[XCSme]

The company has access to all the data, thus it's centralized where one entity has full control over it. Can you further elaborate how those companies don't have access to their data? In case of an aquisition, how safe is all the data stored on all the servers that the company controls? What exactly is not true?

[JackWritesCode]

You shouldn’t keep centralized user data. I’m done here as it’s taking us both too much energy to explain our points. Because I run Fathom, I know about the data I keep, and there’s nothing user specific. Even in our queue, we never store user data...

[XCSme]

I am not saying that the companies themselves are evil or hurt privacy, I fully support thenm. I just saying that by giving one entity access to the data of millions of people and websites you might run into privacy issues at some point, even if the company does everything to avoid that.