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Comment by bauerd | Hacker News Reader

>Google Analytics

>No surprises here. I used to use Plausible, but that costs money and you can't beat free. Monthly cost: $0.

Thanks hard pass. I checked and Plausible starts from 9 Euros a month. This is hardly what I'd consider advertising material. But likely I'm just not their target audience.

There's also no consent banner, so this doesn't seem GDPR compliant

Edit: I must have phrased this in a confusing way. They are NOT using Plausible but GA. I'm well aware cookie-less analytics does not require consent

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Even if you are using Google Analytics, you can skip the consent banner by denying on behalf of the user. GA will then update your counters without doing anything that would require consent.

  ad_storage='denied'

  > Requests are sent through a different domain to avoid previously set third-party cookies from being sent in request headers.
  > Google Analytics will not read or write Google Ads cookies, and Google signals features will not accumulate data for this traffic.
  > IP addresses are used to derive IP country, but are never logged by our Google Ads and Floodlight systems and are immediately deleted upon collection. Note: Google Analytics collects IP addresses as part of normal internet communications.

https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/9976101?hl=en

That, I did not know, and I'm quite happy to hear. I use Plausible where I can, but this kind of information is always helpful to have.

The idea of plausible is that you don't need a consent banner because it is privacy friendly.

They use GA because Plausible costs 9 Euros a month

I was referring to "There's also no consent banner, so this doesn't seem GDPR compliant". They explicitly state that they are GDPR compliant without the need for a consent banner.

How is this relevant if the website in question does not use Plausible?

Edit: If you mean this is stated in the blog post, I can't find it

I was just referring to your comment not the blog post.

> There's also no consent banner, so this doesn't seem GDPR compliant

Plausible uses this one weird trick where they don't use cookies and don't store PII, and thus don't need consent (neither for cookies nor for GDPR). You lose some data because you can't track users across visits, but you gain accuracy (because you can track every visit, not just people who agree) and don't have to annoy your visitors.

So… www logs. That weird trick they have been using since 1994 or earlier!

Basically. Except that htaccess logs won't correctly track page visits on your fancy react page, so you still need a bit of JavaScript.

And once you have that you can also track visit time a bit better, or track goal conversions like how often people click some specific button. But other than that it's basically a more modern webalizer.

And Plausible won't correctly track visits for users who block their JavaScript :)

Also, last year I found a bug in Plausible's script which silently stops it working on some pages, so your data won't be accurate in those scenarios either.

> There's also no consent banner, so this doesn't seem GDPR compliant

I'm not sure what you mean by "consent banner". If you're referring to an annoying "allow us to track everything you do" pop-up, that's probably because Plausible doesn't attempt to track everything you do.

They have plenty of privacy information on their site [1].

[1]: https://plausible.io/privacy-focused-web-analytics

> I'm well aware cookie-less analytics does not require consent

Tangent, but cookie-less analytics may also require consent. It's about PII, and cookies are just one mechanism to tie information to a person.

For example: browser fingerprinting doesn't use cookies, but serves the same purpose.

I knew from the list that it will bring harsh criticism from HN crowd.

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