| Thank you very much for your comment. Nowadays, privacy is a pretty convoluted word. I like to consider it from the point of view of the most impacted actor, the end-user. And from his perspective, you remain a third party as long as his data is concerned. The sole fact that the tool is self-hosted cannot be a guarantee of privacy. Though, it's more likely to achieve stronger privacy if the number of third parties is small. Therefore, with your tool: - Either you have an identity (i.e., hash(x,y,z)) that is persisted over time (notwithstanding its accuracy). - Or you have an identity that is forgotten after a certain period of time (e.g., 24h). In the first case, it cannot be considered a privacy-focused tool, and in the second case, it has the same shortcomings I've described in the original question. --- It is crucial to note that the question is about the quality of users' metrics in privacy-focused tools. There ain't no such thing as a free lunch. End-user's privacy comes at the expense of actionable metrics. Furthermore, at best, people using these tools are not aware of the shortcomings and the risk of misleading numbers. At worse, these very concerns are kept away in the marketing speeches of these tools to minimize their real impact. Above is an opinion, and I would like to debate about it. About my possible misunderstanding of these tools. About possible solutions. |
I do think there is a HUGE difference between centralizing data from many users across the web and sharing it with 3rd parties for marketing or intelligence goals AND simply tracking app stats in order to improve the user experience. The main privacy issue about 3rd party cookies and tracking is that a specific user can be targeted by entity B based on the actions he did on a property owned by a different entity A, without the user ever coming in direct contact with B.
I understand that your main concern is not privacy, but the usefulness of such privacy-friendly stats. Analytics is a very complex space and even if you collect all the data in the world, usually the best decisions can not be derived directly just from the data itself. Also, for in most cases companies are not looking to spend a vast amount of time and resources in order to find the "best" way to go forward, instead they want to collect just enough data that helps them improve there business in some way.
So, for example, if just by approximatively knowing the top referring domain for converting users you can spend more on marketing towards those specific users and increasing your sales, the analytics tool already proved to be useful.
I believe that most of those basic privacy-focused tools already clearly state that they are a "simple" alternative and that they offer only basic stats. To be honest, in many cases, most users have no idea how to use Google Analytics to drill down into data and take relevant actions, so all the data being collected is many times never used.
To sum it up: yes, privacy-friendly tools might offer fewer stats but for the majority of the users using those platforms those basic stats are enough.