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Comment by benp84 | Hacker News Reader

This is blocking Google Analytics, Facebook Connect and New Relic on my site. How would DuckDuckGo prefer that startups measure traffic, ad ROI and site performance? What's the "right" way?

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The "right" way is to accept that privacy-conscious visitors reject your use of third-party tracking, and if you really need to track their visits you must use a first-party tool (Piwik, GoAccess, plain old logfile parsing...). It may not seem fair and it may be frustrating, but blocking third-party tracking is just so easy and anyone who cares about privacy can do it with minimal effort.

As a side benefit, when you start doing your own tracking from server logs, you gain valuable insight into where the gaps in data are from the third-party trackers, and precisely how many visitors are under counted.

You're right that third-party trackers aren't that reliable, and I do my own log analytics for the easy/important stuff, but I'm not about to roll my own New Relic.

This also seems bad for early-stage startups, where developer time is severely limited.

Early stage startups could simply skip all the analytics and do more qualitative UX research with smaller numbers of people they actually interact with in a human way and use large stats for things that actually matter like sales and revenue etc.

The whole idea that you need all the analytics is at least overblown and suffers from the streetlight effect. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetlight_effect

traffic and ad roi is exactly the type of thing I'd like to keep private! The correct way would be not to measure these things.

for performance, chrome and firefox have built-in profilers, and chrome connects quite well to mobile.

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