[mattboulos]

There are two major challenges with building a robust analytics solution for the privacy era: architecture and privacy operations.

In terms of architecture, things that are cross-site (i.e., a script that sends a data to a service that is not yours) are getting blocked by ad blockers and browsers like Brave. This is because, even with the best of publicly stated intentions, there is no way to know what the third-party will do with the data.

Privacy operations itself is exceptionally challenging, because you need to manage consent and purpose, provide auditability, support DSAR, etc. -- unless you operate at the strict minimum (typically what falls within “legitimate interest” under the GDPR).

My company, Blotout (YC W21), approaches this with a cloud native privacy data engineering platform that lets you ingest event and ETL data into to your own lake, and provides a complete privacy operations suite. Since it’s same-site, you’re not blocked as a tracker. And because it pulls and unifies all of your data in your own infra, it’s vastly more efficient than a third-party stack and it lets you do things with you data that you can’t when it’s spread across providers.

Of course, for your personal blog this might be overkill. :)