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by XCSme 1866 days ago
I am not going to contradict you regarding the opportunistic nature of many of the privacy-focused analytics tools showing up lately.

> simple != erroneous

What type of analytics are 100% accurate? I am almost certain almost ANY analytics tool is more accurate than the most popular Google Analytics (mostly because it is blocked by adblockers and being so popular it's used as a spam medium). So, I wouldn't really bash any of the simple analytics for being erroneous when GA is the "most" erroneous out of all, yet it is still the most used.

I still believe my initial point stands, in that having somewhat accurate analytics is usually good enough to take good business decisions in most cases, and if you can do that while being more privacy-friendly, why not?

1 comments

We may converge. Though, let's don't end up in an ideological battle. Thank you for the ride so far.

It's not about accuracy. In the original question, I've depicted a simple ladder of identity, and we both agree that the most accurate counter would be the counter of logged-in users. Anything after is by definition less accurate. In addition, the argument about adblockers is a matter of popularity and time, take, for example, the many contribs to open blocklist projects trying to blacklist the most popular privacy-focused tools. How ironic! Finally, I won't go into the GA bashing game at least out of respect for those who work on and with it, every day; an because it's out of scope here.

So what can we compare? How can we conclude? Let's focus on the very constituent of a unique/returning user metric.

It's all about semantics. We must first agree on semantic and then compare tools. And we both know what is the semantic of a unique/returning user and what cannot be.

Clearly, there is no privacy-focused tool, to the extent of my knowledge, that can or do provide a unique/returning users metric. Though, the problem is that all of them advertise the opposite, sometimes event viciously.

Any other discussion going beyond the semantic feels like I wanted orange juice; still, you provided me with a blend containing no orange while trying to either convince me that orange isn't that good or misleading me by advertising loudly that the blend contains orange.