Hacker News Reader

Comment by rpgbr | Hacker News Reader

It has less features, but Plausible[1] is pretty good at basics.

I use it on my commercial website and I'm happy with it. It's not nearly as full-featured as GA, but it gets the job done in a privacy-friendly way. Getting rid of the cookie banner is a major UX boost.

With everything I have to manage in my infra, clickhouse is another db I don't want to add to the list of moving parts, so I settled with Umami, which uses postgres, which I already use for most of my projects.

ClickHouse is a simple and solid tool - you install it, it works, and it does not require attention. It is probably the less problematic data storage dependency. Works well in embedded scenarios.

I like that plausible is cookie-less, meaning no gdpr cookie banner. I also like that it obeys ad-blockers by default which lets people easily subscribe to their own privacy settings.

Note that "Doesn't use cookies" != "Doesn't require a cookie banner" (the opposite also isn't true). The tool just doesn't collect any PII. IIRC, it can even add a session cookie that just tells it "This user was on the page before", making the analytics more useful without personally identifying users and thus still not requiring a cookie banner.

What does this mean? Can you elaborate? (Appreciate if ELI5)

Privacy-First is not the same as compliant with GDPR. You will find many tools being privacy focused, but not necessarily compliant. But that aside, there is a matter of consent.

So if you want to skip the so-called Cookie Banner, you have to assure that:

1. you have a legitimate interest,

2. no data leaves adequate country/jurisdiction (until recently that meant no US data transfer),

3. privacy policy documents exactly what happens with the data,

4. ... and a few other points.

Cookie Banner is just a common term for consent.

https://wideangle.co/blog/what-is-consent-under-gdpr

Thanks a lot!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com