harianus

I don't want to use a session cookie with an ID to link all events. I don't want any ID because I could potentially link those ID together in the back end based on IP (I don't, but I want people not to have to trust me). I want to make sure I don't get any data that my system could use wrong.

Thanks! I like the way you think.

2. I think encrypting PGP is pretty heavy and maybe not great for the performance of a script that loads on a lot of websites.

3. I'm not sure how fast this will be. Especially on a very busy website with lots of page views per second.

Basically you could also store a variable with the event and send that variable back. What would be the added value to use PGP encryption?

What public metric would you use to prove this (or the opposite of this) point?

> variety of partners, including Oath (formerly Yahoo) and Bing.

They use Bing. That's something else than:

> DuckDuckGo is really Bing under the covers [...]

DuckDuckGo says otherwise [1] and the founder explains their Bing use [2] on their forum [3].

[1] https://duck.co/help/results/sources

[2] https://duck.co/forum/comment/27893

[3] https://duck.co/forum/thread/4350/did-you-know-that-duckduck...

It does: https://www.statista.com/statistics/267161/market-share-of-s...

Thank you! I fill forward your comment to the creators.

It was based on that, but if I look at market share of Google Search in America [1] it goes down for quite some years already.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/267161/market-share-of-s...

I'm seeing this trend (it is a personal statement), and if I look at Googles popularity in Google Trends [1] it's going down in the last 5 years. It's still huge compared to privacy first products like DuckDuckGo [2].

Again, it's my view around me. I didn't have my business yet so it could be that my eyes are more open to privacy first products.

[1] https://g.co/trends/363ud

[2] https://g.co/trends/a7kcZ

That's not a privacy issue. But indeed, you will support Microsoft when using DuckDuckGo. I believe it's necessary to use a big search engine before building your own.

Their ads also run via Bing Ads. This is something they really should change a believe. I tried to run ads for Simple Analytics on DDG but it feels very wrong to use Bing Ads for that. You can't also select "Run on DuckDuckGo only". I think they should move to something of themselves which is likely to happen if they grow bigger.

Fastmail is not a good privacy first solution. People do share it as a great Google Mail alternative, but it's not more privacy friendly [1].

[1] https://www.quora.com/Fastmail-or-Protonmail-Which-one-is-tr...

This is amazing. So many people are starting to de-Google their life. It somehow become a popular subject. Earlier this week Fast Company wrote [1] about it, DuckDuckGo reached 1 billion monthly searches [2] and it's a common thing to see in Hacker News' posts lately.

I'm personally very happy with the raise of awareness. I'm hoping it's will reach the regular folks.

I realized this a few months ago when I started Simple Analytics [3]. I see that advertising is almost done automatically by the press. When Facebook or Google has bad press, it's great for privacy first tools.

[1] https://www.fastcompany.com/90300072/its-time-to-ditch-googl...

[2] https://twitter.com/DuckDuckGo/status/1091709578444750849

[3] https://simpleanalytics.io/?ref=news.ycombinator.com

Thank you for relating this to caring about the product and it's continued support.

The hospital you're describing sounds like a great example for others. It's great if you make it public, you also need to show you're taking actions on how to prevent it from happening (like they invite the family to their meetings). I do think the suing nature in the U.S. plays a part in people hiding their mistakes in for example healthcare.

Your hospital story makes me think of the book Black Box Thinking by Matthew Syed which I red a few years ago. It's about how different the approach is in the airplane sector versus the healthcare sector.

One of the things I don't like about Google is their decision to not be transparent to their users about their mistakes. For example with Google Plus [1]:

> Google did not tell its users about the security issue when it was found in March because it didn't appear that anyone had gained access to user information, and the company’s “Privacy & Data Protection Office” decided it was not legally required to report it, the search giant said in a blog post [2].

As the owner of Simple Analytics I think it's super important to build user trust. It's impossible to not make any mistakes so if a company never shared any mistakes, it's probably not telling you any.

Let's change this fellow hackers and share our mistakes. That's why I wrote a blog post on a mistake I made last week where I lost some user data. Some people would argue if it's smart, but I see this as a moment to show transparency.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/08/technology/google-plus-se...

[2] https://www.blog.google/technology/safety-security/project-s...

I'm using 1984 [1]. I'm writing a blog post on this soon [2], but in short I use Ubuntu Server LVM [3], unlock my system via Dropbear SSH (a very small SSH client)[4] and did move the entry point of incoming data to another server which will store the incoming data only when the main server is down. This is because I want to keep recording incoming data and my encrypted server can't boot without me entering a password. So in case of a power failure the data of my customers will still be recorded.

[1] https://1984.is

[2] https://blog.simpleanalytics.io

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_Volume_Manager_%28Linu...

[4] https://matt.ucc.asn.au/dropbear/dropbear.html

I think it's great we are moving away from big data collectors and running our own servers. What I usually see is people storing their users' data on servers that are situated in locations where governments can get access to the data on the servers without the owner knowing about it. It's maybe going far in protecting the privacy of your users, but it's something a lot of solutions on the internet don't think about.

That's why I moved Simple Analytics' (https://simpleanalytics.io) servers to Iceland where the law will forbid peeking in data before actually informing the owner of the server. I encrypted my server so if anything happens I can just turn it off and it will be nearly impossible to get any user data.

A little late to the party but I’m the developer of Simple Analytics. Servers in Iceland, not selling YOUR data and have it in a simple and clean interface.

After years of NGINX love and hate I finally managed to have my error pages properly styled. Not one HTML page per error, but one template for all.

I always ended up using HTML files for the most common errors, but this is time consuming and annoying to do. Now I have just one error HTML page where I can have custom error messages and descriptions.

It uses the SSI module which is part of NGINX, so no fancy external module.

I hope it helps you as well!

Thank you for your kind words! I think you like to build something cool here for this website.

To reply on your points:

- Adblock users are definitely a portion and some of them are blocking major trackers. Unfortunately also Simple Analytics. But I’m building a proxy so that people can link a CNAME if their domain to Simple Analytics.

- Simple Analytics has indeed a noscript version. It removes the ability to get the referrer though.

- Uniques without tracking. Yes. It’s possible. Will keep HN posted

Good luck with the bloom filter!

You don't need to login to view the list. That would be silly.

I have built a platform that exactly does that. It does require JavaScript for a few reasons:

1. It allows single page apps to analyze

2. Caching of pages does not have any effect on the JS to be executed. Most back end tracking don't know if something is visited when cached.

So I would recommend you to use JavaScript if above reasons apply to you. As far as I know you can't really obfuscate the IP address in a why that you can't track a visitor. That's why I decided to drop IP address from our logs and don't use them at all.

Regarding your last point: unique visitors are hard to measure if you don't use IP or a cookie. A cookie is tracking, be not sure how intrusive you think this is for you. It could be a cookie with just a value of 'visited=1' or something, so you know it's a non-unique visitor when the cookie is present. That way you don't track I think.

You can see demo stats of my platform here https://simpleanalytics.io/simpleanalytics.io

No, you will need a email address to log in.

Thanks for the mention of Privacy First Products, I will probably post that to Hacker News later, but here is already a sneak preview: https://privacyfirstproducts.com

It's quite a challenge to keep focused all the time, but it's super fun to test out what you can do in one day. The code will reflect the fast coding of course, but I'm surprised on the progress of maybe streamers!

Feel free to discuss what you think and if it is still relevant, I think it is.

You fixed it, that's fast ;)

Haha, love this website. If I'm coding alone it feels like being part of a group.

One point: maybe make it clear you can't post when not having a break.

Link to project: https://qeys.io/

Link to Show HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17254737

Ask for credit card data while signing up for the trail period. People that are possible customers don't really mind entering their CC. I did a test with my project Simple Analytics when number one on HN and free people did signup like 50 an hour. Than I cancelled those and paid people came in. Guess how many of those 50 did convert? Zero.

So ask for credit card info first, give a trail for x days and charge monthly automatically.

Your design is awesome ;-)

This is exactly what my tool does, thanks for mentioning @btown. I built Simple Analytics with simplicity and no tracking in mind. That resulted in no annoying cookie banners and no GDPR contracts to worry about. I will make sure my platform does not use cookies now or in the future.

https://simpleanalytics.io

On https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_be_evil

> Following Google's corporate restructuring under the conglomerate Alphabet Inc. in October 2015, Alphabet took "Do the right thing" as its motto, also forming the opening of its corporate code of conduct. The original motto was retained in Google's code of conduct, now a subsidiary of Alphabet. In April 2018, the motto was removed from the code of conduct's preface and retained in its last sentence.

"Do the right thing" maybe suits them better ;)

I indeed did not realise this was a comment on your comment. I guessed correctly, lucky me.