Companies must stop using Google Analytics

My sister-in-law (girlfriends brothers girlfriend, not that it matters) recently studied for a data analytics certification. Actually several.<p>The entire course (located on here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medieinstitutet.se" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medieinstitutet.se</a>) is based on Google Analytics.<p>Now her entire value is tied to the use of Google Analytics, she will almost certainly fight very hard to ensure that these skills remain relevant, nobody would want to retrain for 6-12mo on new analytics systems (or, god forbid, not be an analyst at all!).<p>I think we don&#x27;t really assess the amount of lock-in we allow when we learn something that supposedly makes our lives simpler. Google Analytics was sold as a solution to you making your own analytics, because that&#x27;s hard! and the cost is that google gets your information too- which most webmasters don&#x27;t care about individually.<p>However now we&#x27;re in a situation where at least a few thousand people depend on this <i>precise</i> tool existing, and will be economically useless if it is banned.<p>Personally I find this astonishingly foolish of the people who train exclusively on these tools instead of first principles and primitives.<p>That said; we also have &quot;Cloud Engineer&quot; as a job title, so I&#x27;m not sure we will learn this lesson.

One could still use Google Analytics by proxying the tracking events. Afaik only the IP is considered private data. So one could mask or (non-reversibly) hash the IP, remove anything else which might be considered private data and then send the event to Google. A simple PHP script with a few lines of code could do that.<p>But Google lost me by:<p>A) Making it impossible to convert your old data into the new Analytics version<p>B) Abandoning the API which allowed you to code your own reports. Over the years, I wrote a ton of code that talks to the API. This is all worthless now.<p>I recently switched to self-hosted Matomo. At first I did not think much about it, but now after I got used to it, I have to say it is much better than GA. The interface is so much nicer and snappier. And more logical.<p>Apart from that, I like that it is open source. If there ever is a point in the road where the makers of Matomo decide on a non-compatible fork, I&#x27;m sure the community will write a converter that converts the old data into the new format.<p>And after using it for a while, it hit me: You can write your own reporting tools by just querying the MariaDB database! Using SQL is <i>so</i> much better than it was to fight the insanely complex and unintuitive Google Analytics API.<p>If I really wanted to still use Google Analytics, I would just write a converter, which pumps all the Matomo events into Google Analytics. That would be a GDPR-compliant way to use Google&#x27;s tools. But I don&#x27;t. I&#x27;m done with Google Analytics forever. Matomo is the promised land for me.

This case is about the old Analytics that was replaced with Google Analytics 4 in 2020. So they must stop using a version that Google definitely killed July 1 this year.<p>There are arguments that GA4 would fail the same requirements. Denmark hold that view but it hasn&#x27;t been tried. Their argument is that a EU-citizen that goes to Asia and visits a site there, will have his information sent to US servers and not EU servers. I find this argument objectively absurd considering how internet works but it possible that&#x27;s how the law works. We wouldn&#x27;t know before it has been tried though and I&#x27;d be sceptical about anyone claiming to know the result.

Analytics right now is basically &quot;you won&#x27;t get any useful information for your website because we value users&#x27; privacy, don&#x27;t worry we see all of the data anyway&quot;<p>Remember, you aren&#x27;t the customer if you embed Google Analytics, Google is.<p>edit: if you want analytics, honestly just roll your own... you can&#x27;t trust advertising companies with your users&#x27; data

What I am curios about is how much people actually use ALL the analytics information provided by a lot of these tools. I know Matomo and other such open source&#x2F;self-hostable solutions, but how much info do you really use?<p>I think for most use cases users would want to know if their content is consumed&#x2F;read. Maybe how long someone spends on it and where they came from. For this sort of stuff you can write a small script to parse your logs. I did something along these lines to parse Caddy logs to get some idea of how many people visit a link. That&#x27;s really all I needed and the great part is that I run it whenever I want an update, so it&#x27;s not consuming resources constantly. The logs are cleared and the output is saved before logs are cleared so I know Article 1 had 39 views (or less!) and Article 2 had 5 views and so on...<p>So I think we&#x27;re overdoing it and we would benefit from taking a few minutes before going down the rabbit hole of analyzing EVERYTHING.

Unrelated: I used ChatGPT to generate remark.js presentation HTML code from some content. It did generate the code, but it inserted a GA snippet along with a random GA account code at the bottom of the code. I did not even catch it immediately (laziness, totally my fault), but noticed it a couple of days later when I was modifying the presentation.

Who needs analytics? I&#x27;m confused.<p>When I worked at companies using google analytics, 99.9% of the time they could have gotten this data from server logs with something like awstats or goaccess.<p>To this day, I still don&#x27;t get what&#x27;s the point of embedding some javascript to do extra-requests or a tracking pixel, when the data was already given once.

Had an engagement with a client a few years ago and GA came up. Folks on our side tried to avoid Google where possible, and I&#x27;d suggested some alternatives. Matomo, Fathom(IIRC) or others - multiple folks on the team had experience with these alternatives, but the client was insistent on GA. &quot;This is the industry standard - look at all the billion dollar companies running GA - this is what we should use&quot;. I pointed out those comparison companies also had dozens of engineers per project; we had 3 part time people.<p>The argument kept coming down to &quot;GA is the standard; GA is what people know&quot;. Which is... true, if not somewhat circular.<p>My other suggestion was try multiple; run GA and Matomo together, for example, for a bit. Or GA on just the public marketing site, and something else on the internal application. Nope, because they wanted to track every single ad spend all the way through to registered user usage of the internal business application. Knowing that the $70 you spent in Tacoma geo lead to 3 users registering then knowing that those 3 people routinely used a budgeting tool more than the $90 spent on 8 people who registered from Toronto... apparently those sorts of analytics might be needed in the future, so we have to have this.<p>Instead of &quot;let&#x27;s just install both for a few weeks and try them&quot;, this became &quot;let&#x27;s &#x27;investigate&#x27; multiple options and write reports about the pros and cons of each&quot;. Nuts. My larger concern was that, for testing&#x2F;dev purposes, we&#x27;d not have as easy a time of &#x27;resetting&#x27; an analytics DB that was not under our control (resetting or maybe creating new&#x2F;unlimited sandboxes for each test run). I didn&#x27;t find any way in GA (or really any hosted solution) to handle testing well. But maybe that&#x27;s not a big concern among &#x27;enterprise&#x27; analytics users?

Every time a client makes me implement google analytics or facebook pixel code I die a little inside. And even though some actually use google ads, they have zero benefit from using analytics. I know, because I&#x27;m the one adjusting their campaigns.<p>It&#x27;s just another thing everyone does and one would be stupid not to, right, right? The lemming mentality always makes me sad because so many bad things in our society are a result of it.<p>And every time someone says that rolling your own is a waste of time,.. I roll everything my own, including CMS &#x2F; SPA frameworks, because it&#x27;s a giant waste of time to do otherwise in the long run. The only time I waste regarding rolling on my own is when tobacco is involved.

When I visit a company site and it uses google analytics I know they are either: lazy, ignorant or hostile towards their (potential) clients.<p>This set of possibilities spans all cases and none is actually a positive signal.<p>Companies (and any entity that has an online presence for that matter) are entitled to know what people are doing in their platform and use any appropriate tool for that purpose. They are not entitled to share that with anyone without the explicit warning and approval of their users.<p>The Web as a digital predation ground where the amoral fleece the ignorami must stop.<p>While (commercial) life is not exactly an ethical showcase, the digital version as it has come to evolve is particularly out of kilt with common norms.

For those who look for an alternative <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;plausible.io" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;plausible.io</a> is a great replacement.

I&#x27;ve finally come to the conclusion that user tracking is generally a poor practices and should be regulated.<p>As a web developer, I didn&#x27;t see it as a big problem. We always do it to maximize ad revenue, find out where users leave to increase conversion rate, and simply to improve UX. But even when the intent is to improve UX, tracking is inappripriate.<p>Imagine if a robot vacuum recorded videos of your home and uploaded them so that bunch of ML engineers can see and use it to improve the algorithm. Or the videos of your car&#x27;s camera (both of inside and outside). I mean, I&#x27;m not surprised if this is already happening, but it&#x27;s a disturbing thought and should be regulated.<p>We can certainly develop functional services without tracking users.

If you need a powerhouse like Google Analytics and are not afraid of complex UI, go with Matomo. Even better if you self-host and have people to support it.<p>If want something lighter that is just a turn key solution but lets you grow (collecting more data for users who gave you consent, or being super strict about privacy without consent) then go with Wide Angle Analytics (our product).<p>The time when GA was the only option is long gone.

Luckily for them, google has basically forced everyone to stop using analytics as of July this year (I don&#x27;t consider ga4 to be a replacement).

I am so grateful for the progressive policies in Europe that help the entire globe.

Good. I hope the same authority does a round of fines for companies using noncompliant tracking opt out UX too. A nice chunk of total revenue as a fine without prior warning for anyone showing the &quot;Accept all&#x2F;Show purposes&quot; question would be delicious.

That&#x27;s why we built Usermaven.com, a privacy-friendly website and product analytics tool.<p>Our website analytics module is simple and gets the job done in one single easy-to-use dashboard.<p>However, if you want to dig deep, you can use funnels, journeys and other features to get more insights out of our analytics.<p>Usermaven collects all client-side events automatically so it makes it really easy for marketing teams to get insights without involding devs.<p>We also offer simple ready-made reports for SaaS businesses to get product insights.

Well, it was only a mouse and cat game here.(with local exemption for France for example that provide an exit pass but render the tools without much interest after)<p>The focus on Google Analytics is really funny because plenty other company use similar tech to track users (pardot pixel, hubspot etc...) And both parent company are us bases so similar &#x27;transfer to us&#x27; is being made with much more PII than google analytics.<p>(Noyb is probably coming to you as well as Facebook).

Good news then, Google has deliberately and bizarrely broken its API, so thousands or possibly millions of legacy sites will never correctly report their analytics again.

I&#x27;d like to note here that NOYB seems to be doing great work, and is one of the very few institutions I donate to. I think they&#x27;re worth a donation:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;noyb.eu&#x2F;en&#x2F;donations-other-support-options" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;noyb.eu&#x2F;en&#x2F;donations-other-support-options</a>

Yes, you should absolutely not be using Google Analytics. They don&#x27;t need more data, your users don&#x27;t want to see cookie banners and most of you really don&#x27;t need 99% of the data that you can filter through...<p>I can&#x27;t recommend Fathom (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;usefathom.com" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;usefathom.com</a>) enough. They have a huge focus on privacy-first tracking. You don&#x27;t need to show a cookie banner and you can still track events etc.<p>If you want $10 credit for signing up, use <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;usefathom.com&#x2F;james" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;usefathom.com&#x2F;james</a> but otherwise, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;usefathom.com" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;usefathom.com</a><p>Seriously, Google Analytics sucks. Use anything other than that.

While I appreciate the push for privacy and anti-tracking, ultimately the tools to prevent tracking are in the hands of users and organizations. The concept that countries have jurisdiction or even exist within the confines of the web is a laughably antiquated idea projecting itself into a realm where it doesn’t belong. Google and all of the usual suspects will continue to collect information about the public in all of the ways that they want, while the naive public believes in some false notion that their leaders are protecting them from the big bad wolf. If you don’t want to be tracked, the only person who can prevent that is you. Government agencies are the keystone cops or this is world. All they’re doing is a Chinese fire drill.

I&#x27;m afraid this is not going to help much.<p>Instead, we should have a law against a panopticon.<p>I wonder how fast we&#x27;d have such a law if Google were a Chinese company ...<p>Perhaps the way to get rid of Google Analytics is thus to start a Chinese company and make everybody use their analytics tool.

Nothing surprising, this was kinda clear already not too long after the regulation was passed and since then quite a lot of curt decisions which bordered that topic have painted a very clear picture of &quot;it&#x27;s not really compatible with the law&#x2F;regulation but you might get away with it anyway&quot;.<p>Also given some scamy things google was found to be doing in their ad business and personal experiences people I know had when running different statistics and ad providers along side of google and noticing gross divergence I _personally_ really wouldn&#x27;t trust google analytics or ads at all if I where a business.

The heading seems very strong considering this is a governmental agency and since they audited a &quot;version of Google Analytics from 14th of August 2020&quot; and presumably not GA4 that works differently.

Ok, what is it that google&#x2F;Facebook analytics is providing people that has them so obsessed with harming their users privacy and slowing their page loads?<p>I really don&#x27;t get it: you don&#x27;t need to sell out your users to google, Facebook, etc to get page view counts, time page loads, get browser statistics, etc. What is it that site developers actually think they&#x27;re getting out of abusing their users?

I am using a self-hosted Plausible [1] instance, which is GDPR-compliant out of the box with no cookies required. I am super happy with it. The only downside is that you need to run Postgres and Clickhouse which is overkill for my small sites (an option that only uses SQLite would be great). I don&#x27;t want to track my users. I just want to see which pages get traffic. Sometimes I am also curious about where visitors come from (by country) and what devices they are using.<p>In a newer update, they allow region tracking based on cities. I think this is too much information. I did not enable this and hope they won&#x27;t add other more intrusive features.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;plausible.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;plausible.io&#x2F;</a>

It used to be that Google needed GA to see how users used a site.<p>But I think they just track at the Chrome-level now.<p>So using GA is really just a way for you to see what Google sees about your site.<p>Blocking GA use... I don&#x27;t think it really hurts Google any more. I think they get all they need -- more than they ever got through GA -- through trackers in Chrome.

I think companies should stop using fixed navigation banners but we can&#x27;t all get what we want now can we?<p>Like holy crap, I agree with you but your website is unreadable with that may as well be a banner ad of a navigation bar that keeps popping in and out of existence every time I scroll down.

Seems like we have a lot of good GA alternatives on here already. Thought I&#x27;d add one: goatcounter.com<p>Not mine, and I only just started using it. But it&#x27;s easy to implement, and shows &quot;just enough&quot; analytics data for me. Nice simple option.

Interesting. I thought Google had built the tooling needed to keep European data in EU servers ages ago for compliance on this topic. Maybe I&#x27;m thinking of just Google Cloud?

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=36575305">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=36575305</a> among others

I put Google Analytics on my forum because I thought that maybe having it would help it be found in Google Search.<p>Google Lighthouse immediately started pissing and bitching about slow page load times because it had to wait for Google Analytics to load.<p>My site still does not really show up much in Google Search.<p>I binned Google Analytics because it basically did fuck all of any use.<p>I don&#x27;t have one of those fucking idiotic cookie popups, because it doesn&#x27;t need one, no-one needs one, and they&#x27;re entirely meaningless noise.

I wonder if this also will apply to Google&#x27;s ad related spyware? Going after just Analytics seems like quite a small step.

Could Google outsmart them by hosting some of the data in EU, but still keeping spying on customers?

Not saying it is morally correct to use Google Analytics. But I still find it amusing the Nordic countries see it is OK for everyone to know everyone&#x27;s else salary while it is not OK for Google to know your IP.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dailyscandinavian.com&#x2F;income-tax-transparency-norway-sweden&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dailyscandinavian.com&#x2F;income-tax-transparency-no...</a>

Those looking for alternatives can take a look at my book which evaluates 15 different options: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gaalternatives.guide" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gaalternatives.guide</a><p>I also have a google sheet listing the basics of each of those tools: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gaalternatives.guide&#x2F;sheet" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gaalternatives.guide&#x2F;sheet</a>

google or other providers could mitigate this by Allowing the Analytics subscriber to configure which fields to &quot;exclude&quot; or &quot;include&quot; when logging requests.<p>Regulators are only going to get tougher with service providers, it&#x27;s wise to prepare.

This has also happened in Denmark.

Currently using self hosted Motamo Analytics. Very easy to use and intuitive.

What analytics solutions are there that you can host yourself?

As long as it is via domains I am able to block, it is fine.

This yet another ruling after Austria, Finland, France, Denmark and Italy<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wideangle.co&#x2F;blog&#x2F;is-google-analytics-illegal-under-gdpr" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wideangle.co&#x2F;blog&#x2F;is-google-analytics-illegal-under-...</a><p>The writing was on the wall for years now.<p>Some DPAs like CNIL fire warning shots first, giving 4 months to comply. Then the fines keep rolling.

So, a dumb question. What&#x27;s the easiest way to run privacy friendly analytics on static github pages? &quot;Privacy friendly&quot; as in unambiguously no need for cookie&#x2F;gdpr permission popups. &quot;Analytics&quot; can be as simple as page loads per day count. Anything beyond that is a bonus.

&gt; <i>According to the data protection regulation, GDPR, personal data may be transferred to third countries, i.e. countries outside the EU&#x2F;EEA, if the European Commission has decided that the country in question has an adequate level of protection for personal data that corresponds to that within the EU&#x2F;EEA. However, the CJEU ruled through the Schrems II ruling that the United States could not be considered to have such an adequate level of protection at the time of the ruling.</i><p>- European Court of Justice (CJEU)<p>I always thought that by asking for permission in the privacy statement, and in the cookie banner analytics cookies are also explicit usually, it would be OK.<p>But indeed, even if you refuse the analytics cookies (I do that automatically, who doesn&#x27;t?), that still does not stop the website from transferring PII to google analytics. I am assuming that here, not a user of analytics, but i suppose it will still work without cookies, maybe just a little less accurate.

I only use GA because our ad provider, Mediavine, requires it

I had expected such orders after GDPR went into effect. I guess I was young and naive back then...

Just another thing that&#x27;s going to leave the EU in the stone age, falling further and further behind the USA economically.<p>15 years ago, US and EU GDP per capita were about the same. Now the USA is 50% higher. Even West Virginia is richer per person than France.

why?<p>then what are the alternatives of google analytics. Google is big guient that are collecting all world data. alternative platforms are doing the same. We are not secure anywhere i think.<p>Privacy is already brocken, no options.