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Comment by TomGullen | Hacker News Reader

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TomGullen

I still can't see any solid reasons why a site owner would not use GA.

Other products:

- Objectively lack features

- Potentially incur extra costs in money/time

- May be a small barrier in m&a

- May carry additional risks/attack vectors if self hosted

Trying to ween off big tech is commendable, but likely detrimental to a business.

Relatively high risk, low reward.

I'm happy to have my mind changed. I can see a case for user hostility, but most sites I imagine don't have an audience sensitive to this at the moment anyway.

From an idealogical standpoint, other cloud stat tracking services would only function if not many people used them. And I would also imagine feature creep would be inevitable and lead them to becoming an inferior version of GA.

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Some issues with GA version going self-hosted: - Privacy of your users: For a specific user, Google knows all the website he visits - Privacy your data: If Google knows the visitors of most websites, your competitors can leverage that advantage (using Google Ads for example) to steal your potential customers. - Google Analytics is bloated and slow (both in terms of the tracking script and the dashboard UI, where it takes several seconds for each graph/page to load). - You don't own your data, at any point Google can, even though unlikely to, block your account (for breaking ToS of some other service of theirs) and you lose all your data. - If everyone uses GA, it will become (already is) an analytics monopoly, which has many other drawbacks (lack of innovation for example).

I do think that for the average user, using GA might be fine because it's free, easy to set-up and does its job. That is unless they care about all the possible consequences.

GA alternatives are a fairly new thing. When I looked at this in May last year there was essentially only one alternative: Matomo. It seems some sort of "critical mass" has been reached, and in the last year quite a few people have independently started working on alternatives.

I agree for many features are still lacking, but as a counter-argument 1) not everyone needs those features (not every product needs to solve 100% of the use cases), and 2) a lot of these products are still quite new, and are actively working on adding a number of those features.

If your site actively competes with a Google product, you might not want to give them access to your user data.

GDPR compliance.

GDPR is the European privacy law. It protects European citizens so it applies not only to European companies but any company that does business in Europe (having offices or advertising/selling there).

Google does not give much assurance regarding their GDPR compliance... their text on that subject is mostly CYA and then they make it your responsibility to decide how to use it in compliance (if at all possible).

The GDPR gives you a small window to count visitors through cookies as long as all private information (even IP) is anonymized... OR you can go do a more traditional tracking with their explicit agreement. This last use case is completely useless in terms of visitor statistics, but analytics companies sometimes dare suggest it (as in "this is the way to do things right... so our product is compliant and it's not our responsibility if you break the law").

That aside, I run international non-profit sites and GA is a bad look... and with good reason: Using social network sharing buttons, GA, CDNs, etc. gives too much power to track people to a few companies.

> GA is a bad look

Totally agree, but are there "acceptable" CDNs, like unpkg? What about Google Fonts?

> The GDPR gives you a small window to count visitors through cookies as long as all private information (even IP) is anonymized.

If it's not too much to ask, could you expand on that a bit, or share a link? I guess you mean it's ok to send a browser fingerprint for unique visitor stats without having to ask for permission, but I'm not aware of any legal debate let alone court decision with respect to that.

Edit: obviously I can't read ("through cookies"), but cookies for unique visitor counts aren't "functional" are they, so my interpretation is that those cookies need consent; I'd love to hear otherwise though

>GDPR is the European privacy law. It protects European citizens

The GDPR does not discriminate based on citizenship.

It applies if the organisation providing the service is in the EU/EEA* OR if the user of the service is in the EU/EEA* (to the extent that the data reference their activity in the EU/EEA).

And the UK, but thanks to brexit there's a parallel UK GDPR in place so... take that in to account.

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