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by perlpimp 2134 days ago
Would you be creating on premise service - ie analytics data directly from the site? Seems many browsers now block GA and other trackers.
2 comments

Indeed, if this product is dependent on Google Analytics it is probably a little late: It's a matter of time before browsers are all blocking GA by default.
I've heard this blocked-from-analytics traffic be called "shadow traffic".

https://blog.parse.ly/post/9616/shadow-traffic-why-your-traf...

I agree. This was probably a much needed product 8-10 years ago, and you'd had a huge market. Unfortunately, I feel your time is ticking and you're way too late.
I don't see Chrome going anywhere for a long time, and I don't see Google blocking its own analytics service within its own browser on its own volition.
Google may have a hard time continuing to explain away it's refusal to respect user privacy as the sole browser that doesn't block GA. And if the Chrome team continues to fight privacy initiatives, Chrome will be replaced by something like Edge, which is compatible but also actually cares about privacy and security (these two things are the same, if you aren't prioritizing privacy you are not a secure browser).

Regulators will also be paying attention to this over the next few years.

I think a startup should be very aware of these risks if building off of GA.

I have a hard time believing Edge is any more private then Chrome, it's just a question of who gets the data.

I'd love to be proved wrong on this though.

It's weird for you to believe this, because Chrome is made by an ad company whose sole goal in existence is collecting data for ad targeting...

Many of Chrome's features are implemented in Edge by replacing Google services with Microsoft ones. So for many things, Microsoft may be collecting similar data (though likely not monetizing it at all).

But the key thing is that tracking prevention: It means your browser is leaking your data around the internet significantly less. Not just less to Google, but less to almost everyone else on the Internet. Chrome, by refusing to implement tracking prevention, is pretty much a leaky ship with holes in it.

Here's Edge's implementation: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/web-platform...

Here's Firefox's implementation: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/enhanced-tracking-prote...

Here's Safari's implementation: https://webkit.org/blog/7675/intelligent-tracking-prevention...

Chrome has nothing. Google paid some of their staff to write a FUD piece about how preventing tracking was a privacy risk somehow.

All valid points. Much appreciated.

I was coming from a position of "Why would MS remove anything instead of redirecting it to themselves", but failed to consider that they would be adding things themselves to prevent other tracking.

Our next steps as a company are to deploy our reporting and AI-backed alertings into any data-source. Google was/is the biggest in the space, so that made sense as a V1. Our vNext will connect to much more.
Our startup uses a combo of Google Analytics, Stripe, and our own database for important metrics. Any plans to be able to pull directly from databases (we use postgres)? Thanks, seems like a cool product.
That would be great, not sure where that fits in our roadmap, but I'd love to be able to do it.