Two steps in the right direction, but this one page still sends requests to soundcloud.com, rawgit.com, cloudflare.com, googleapis.com, amazonaws.com, fontawesome.com, sndcdn.com, stackcommerce.com, stackassets.com, stacksocial.com, and gravatar.com.<p>Their "self-hosted" Plausible content is pulled from tics.techdirect.com, which resolves to 46.101.161.209 and shares a reverse DNS with custom.plausible.io. Can't tell who runs the web server on the other end of this, so it may well be self-hosted.<p>The site also dropped a first-party one-year cookie, and let a third party drop a week-long cookie.<p>My browser is set to send Do Not Track requests, so my explicit wishes are still being flagrantly ignored.<p>There is still a lot of third-party tracking going on here, as well as execution of remote code under the control of third parties. It's remains a privacy and security clusterfuck but it's better than it was.
Ads should be relevant to the site, not the user.<p>For example, I buy hot rod magazines to get the advertisements selling hot rod parts in those magazines. I don't buy them to read toothpaste ads. I even <i>pay money</i> to get those ads.<p>But if I was visiting a site about dental hygiene, I'd be interest in the toothpaste ads.<p>I've tried to configure context-sensitive ads from Amazon on my web site to be books on programming. But Amazon would insist on showing:<p>1. batman movie ads<p>2. the same ad for a C++ course over and over and over and over<p>So I wound up removing those from the site. Instead, I created a list of good programming books myself, and would randomly cycle through that list to show an ad.<p>It would be so much better if I could enable:<p>"Only show books from this category."<p>as my aim is to only show advertisements that would be of interest to the people reading the site.<p>Google has context sensitive ads, and one would think this would work. But it doesn't. For example, I have a page on the American Revolution. Google's context sensitive ads are usually for travel agencies, presumably based on the place names on the page. Actually relevant ads would be for history books. I tried meta keywords, etc., nothing worked. I gave up. Google's context algorithms are worthless and the site owner should be able to provide guidance.
We were discussing with them adding <a href="https://www.ethicalads.io/" rel="nofollow">https://www.ethicalads.io/</a> which is our new non-tracking ad network. Sadly we're still only focused on developers, and Techdirt's content is very wide ranging, so we were only able to propose running ads on a subset of their content currently. We'd love to be able to support them when we are able to expand our audience to a larger tech-focused site in the future.
What's the use case for using both Plausible and Matomo at the same time? Just pseudo-"A/B" testing for which one is a better fit or are there major feature differences where using both is needed?<p>Or just for kicks?
I evaluated both Plausible and Matamo as privacy preserving analytics options for my blog, and ended up rolling my own solution for cost reasons. Cloudflare workers and Pulumi make this pretty trivial to self host.<p>Here's the Show HN that never picked up steam: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27175347" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27175347</a>
Ironically, the entire Techdirt site is blocked for me by one of my content blockers. I don't actually know what Techdirt is or whether it's worth unblocking.
And yet it still asks for a boatload of cookies. If it really were "clean", it wouldn't need the cookie banner (see Github, for example).
Google Ads is so deep into tracking that it defeats its own purpose.<p>I search for Product A on Google or Amazon and am immediately inundated with ads for the same product on <i>every page I go that has Google ads</i><p>What is worse is that the ads continue even after I purchase the product / service. So I get ads for a mobile phone I searched for and bought in Amazon (and all its accessories) for months after I have already purchased it.<p>My mind automatically ignores every ad.
Is anyone here familiar with Matomo? I noticed the linked page attempts to run it before seeing it mentioned, because Ghostery blocked it.<p>It's a “Free software alternative to Google Analytics” “which <i>can</i> easily be configured to respect your visitors' privacy”[0] (emphasis mine). But can it be configured in a way so you can claim “without any tracking code”? I wonder whether the claim in the headline was supposed to be merely “no third-party tracking”. [Edited to add:] Waiiit a moment, is the intended meaning simply “no <i>Google</i> tracking code”? (I don't think the article addresses this anywhere; hope I didn't just miss something.)<p>Or maybe I'm supposed to know that “no tracking” is jargon for something like ”attempts to not store PII” in this industry? I doubt that it can be configured such that, for example, unique visitors are statistically estimated instead of counting unique IDs from tracking cookies — but I'm too lazy to research that in detail, so it would be interesting to hear from someone who knows more.<p>[0] <a href="https://github.com/matomo-org/matomo" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/matomo-org/matomo</a>
Recently there have been a few companies formally distancing themselves from Google, and doing so with a press release. Is there a reason why this is happening now?<p>To my knowledge, Google's basic nature has been known for quite a while, and people who care have lined up on different sides depending on their ideologies and self-interests. What has changed in the last 6 months that makes so many companies change their opinions about working with them? Is it just that public opinion has crossed some tipping point where it makes sense to gamble on a temporary revenue hit in order to be on the "right side"? That seems unlikely, just because I don't know a lot of people who weren't skeptical of Google a year ago who are now.<p>Is it related to FLoC? That seems like a wonky issue that's under most people's radar. Is it the EU antitrust hearings? Also seems unlikely.<p>Honest question: why now?
The message is that Techdirt is without Google Ads, Tracking Code or analytics.<p>This may be a set in the right direction but.....<p>The same page on which they posted this is running CSS from fonts.googleapis.com, as well as embedded frames from soundcloud.com & w.soundcloud.com which I also believe is google owned.<p>So, count me a little skeptical
My uBlock Origin blocks 3 requests, AdBlockPlus blocks 5 and Privacy badger blocks another 3. en.wikipedia.org and news.ycombinator.com have 0 on all three filters.
Can someone tell me why Techdirt is not featured often in the Google front page results when compared to other media? Is it because they originally had summary to 3rd party content and so Google ranked them low for not having original content?<p>But now they seem to have only original content.
Mike Masnick/Techdirt's political lobbying arm, Copia Institute, still proudly promotes their sponsorship from Google on their front page: <a href="https://copia.is/" rel="nofollow">https://copia.is/</a>
NoScript is reporting the following:<p>1. techdirt.com<p>2. cloudflare.com<p>3. fontawesome.com<p>4. s3.amazonaws.com<p>5. soundcloud.com<p>Now, I don't know what kind of scripts are being loaded from these sources but things are looking refreshingly spartan, considering techdirt is an online publication<p>For comparison, arstechnica usually has like 18 sources, 10 of which are trackers
Try Microsoft ads, they aren’t backstopped by Google in any way.<p>Regardless of ownership, you’ll run into same problems almost everywhere if you publish articles critical of your advertisers. That’s nothing to do with Google and just the market working as intended/expected.