Comment by jagthebeetle | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jagthebeetle | Hacker News Reader

Disclaimer: I'm a bit of a GA power user; although being on the technical side, I'm not really sympathetic towards the marketing uses for analytical data.

There's a tough line to draw between excessive and sufficient instrumentation for a given app, and a business will probably opt for more than less data. I'm not sure that's a moral argument against tools like GA, though.

Especially given one particularly compelling feature of Universal Analytics (GA's latest incarnation): you can definitely water down what you collect. (https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection...)

Want to opt out of collecting advertising info? Say so in the UI. Anonymize/obliterate the IP/geolocation info? Override the IP field to a static value. Override the intrusive collection of User-Agent values? Override the ua parameter. Prevent collection of granular page info? Override the dl, dp, dt fields. Stop collecting referral info? Blank out the dr, cs, cm, cn, and remove UTMs/GCLIDs from the URLs you report.

In fact, you can even implement measurement protocol serverside – GA's ancient forebear, Urchin Analytics, actually began as a server-log parsing utility! (https://urchin.biz/urchin-software-corp-89a1f5292999)

Reduce JavaScript use altogether but keep it clientside? Implement a static GA pixel:

  <img src="https://google-analytics.com/collect?v=1&tid=UA-XXXXX-Y&cid=somevalue&dp=%2Fsomepath&ua=YourUserAgent&...">

Now, mistrust of a third party with said data is a relevant issue, but slightly different from the technical bones of this piece's argument.

> Anonymize/obliterate the IP/geolocation info? Override the IP field to a static value.

This might affect the IP you see in the GA dashboard, but it's worth noting that Google still get the user's IP as long as the client makes any connection to a Google server (via JS or pixel).

> you can even implement measurement protocol serverside

This is the only way for a site owner to truly get full control over what data you send to GA (while still using GA), but it robs the site visitor of the option to opt out using client-side tools like uMatrix, &c. This is the one small advantage of the rise of client-side tracking: as a visitor I can get a reasonably good overview of which third parties your sending my data to.

Luckily, if you care about letting the user opt-out, you can respect DoNotTrack: http://donottrack.us/

That's a very interesting notion, I didn't know you could use a GA pixel. That's a much better alternative to the full-blown JS tracker, thank you.

What about running your own service like piwik?

That would be best, I tried to run it for me but my needs are too simple for a full-blown solution like that. I'm currently trying to just add a tracking image to my own server so I can count visits.

Server logs?

I'm using netlify, which is a global CDN, and doesn't provide logs :/

Curious how that pixel works... do you have to mouse over it, seems like if it was that case would be a bad approach/design, one pixel versus 1366x768 (at least). Also I wonder that code sample you posted isn't complete (realize why) but I wonder if it has bound JS or how it works technically (all in the source)... do you still have to include a script... I should just Google it haha.

Google Analytics just allows you to GET a URL to send an event, which that tracking pixel does. Interesting that it actually returns an image, though, I didn't know that.

So that runs once when the page loads? It's not a continuous/real time tracker? Feel free not to respond as I said I can just Google. Thanks though.

Nope it will fire again after 30 minutes but not continuously

Interesting for my own tracking I was thinking the next logical step might be to use websockets but I'm not sure.

I don't think the web pixel will, that just runs on page load, unless you have some fancy JS to do other things (but then you could just call the event directly).

Yeah you are right sorry thats the session that finishes, had it configured a different way on a certain site.

Think it's been answered, but the link below might provide more information on tracking pixels/beacons.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_beacon

Thanks for that, I've seen/heard of tracking pixels but haven't tried them yet.

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