harianus

Adriaan from the article here. You are right. HN is the right target group for Simple Analytics. If I had posted a totally different product with no privacy angle or interest for HN readers, it would have little result. You need to find you target audience and I believe HN is one for Simple Analytics.

I also hear a lot of people knowing Simple Analytics from Hacker News. So maybe they don't convert to customer yet, they know about my tool. Which is super useful and got me talks with DuckDuckGo and other great companies. It's not only for selling your tool, it's also great for getting your name out there.

Added Simple Analytics [1]

[1] https://simpleanalytics.com

It seems like you’re saying it’s nice to know the layers of abstraction but it sounds like you don’t use it in real life.

As a non CS degree developer I can’t really see anything that I’m missing because of not having the degree. I have a successful business, get hired for freelance jobs for a good salary, can build anything I want, ...

Would love to know what one would get out of having the degree versus self study.

Thanks! For others, listen to it here: https://www.vox.com/2018/7/18/17575156/mark-zuckerberg-inter...

They need to change their business model to be able to become privacy friendly, I totally agree. Not even sure which huge company is privacy friendly. Maybe it's not even possible at that level. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't.

I will try to ask as much as possible, and really like your questions of what data points are useful and are they privacy sensitive.

Thanks!

Yes, will definitely ask about that.

Thanks. That would be interesting to know. One thing; what do you mean with measure it?

What do you mean? I think using CloudFront is not accurate enough if you use caching.

Not at the moment. We will implement tracking user flow with in a privacy minded way. I asked Hacker News a while ago if they would think it was privacy friendly [1]

To be clear about the other thread about bypassing ad blockers. We will not have this feature when tracking user flow. People should have the right to block events if they want. But for basic info as in page views we keep offering the ad blocker bypass feature.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19136044

If your business is to track people, yes. If it's to gather statistics without tracking people (like page views), I think it perfectly fine to bypass ad blockers. We even have a dedicated feature for bypassing ad blockers [1] because we think page views are not privacy invasive. We drop IP addresses from every request so there is no personal data in our database or logs.

If you really want to block you can enable the Do Not Track setting. Although I think this should only be used when you are actually tracking people (we don't). So this feature might be removed in the future. It's already removed by Safari because it is another parameter to fingerprint a browser.

[1] https://docs.simpleanalytics.com/bypass-ad-blockers

> However this still requires setting up the image on a third-party server.

While this is true, we found a solution to bypass ad blockers (which could be implemented by Google Analytics as well). My experience is that ad blockers only block scripts and pixels that are implemented on multiple websites [1]. With having a custom domain and a non analytics named script or URL, ad blockers are unlikely to block you. At Simple Analytics we created a feature for this where customers can point a CNAME to our server [2]. We setup SSL and proxy all requests to our server. This makes it almost impossible for ad blockers to block the stats of those customers.

[1] https://github.com/easylist/easylist/pull/1855

[2] https://docs.simpleanalytics.com/bypass-ad-blockers

It's removed by Google, all search result clicks go through an intermediate URL that removes the keywords. You can have some information from the Google URL [1].

[1] https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/a/107179

> Now that we're bootstrapping, we've shifted away from a freemium business model (where users could optionally pay if they wanted) to a paid-only model after a free trial.

I think this is great, and where venture capital fails; having real demand and not only focus on growth.

<3

Ah, good point. We already do so it's just a matter of not sending the email address to Stripe. Thank you for the suggestion. Added this to our roadmap: https://simpleanalytics.io/roadmap#109207

This is a good point. We are moving to a dedicated server to resolve this issue.

Iceland has 100% green energy and their location is slightly better. Maybe the biggest plus is their laws.

This seems to work for links, but does it work for when you embed a script?

> [...] by using the referrerpolicy attribute on <a>, <area>, <img>, <iframe>, or <link> elements

Hm, seems not to work for scripts.

A little note on hosting companies. In Europe at least there are corporations that only host data in Europe and don't use any hosting companies from the US. This is a question which we repeatedly get at Simple Analytics. So avoiding those companies has advantages business wise.

Good point which I forgot to mention in the article.

There are not a Linodes or Digital Oceans in Iceland so it’s definitely more expensive. I think it’s safe to say it’s almost double the price if you buy a VPS with similar specs. Check out 1984hosting.com or orangewebsite.com to figure out for yourself.

Hi Hacker News,

I'm the writer of this blog post. I am pretty sure that HN readers will find incorrect assumptions or know how to tackle the described problems better. I can handle HN feedback, so please help this guy out ;-)

This is a great move Dell. Hope others will follow.

Nice! Hope to see more people ditching Google Analytics in the name of privacy!

We are going way off topic here, too bad there is not even one answer to my question:

> Do you think this is acceptable from a privacy perspective?

But back to your point. Query params contain usually tokens, search queries, and id's. This is not so much the case for paths. I think you agree with that. But indeed, paths can have sensitive information too.

How would you prevent that data to be sent to my server?

And what would it be from a privacy perspective if I set a cookie for 90 days. I can't link this to any personal information and my customers will only see my tool where they can see the conversions (they don't get access to the "link" in the tables above).

Not really, that is more for when you have sensitive data and want to show that data publicly. I want to have only insensitive data and make sure I don't get sensitive data from the visitors.

I'm happy I can pay for my password manager. It's also great that it's a subscription. You know why? I want people to have money to improve the security of my personal data, I'm using the service every day, so it makes sense to pay for it via a subscription.

I would never want to use a free password manager, because it's likely they have different intentions with your data or are can shut it down any time.

While I can understand this being true for AOL:

> The data includes personal names, addresses, social security numbers and everything else someone might type into a search box.

I don't think I have a similar issue with page views of one website of one session. I strip all query params and only save the hostname and path of the URL. I think it's nearly impossible to ever link that to a user. Maybe if you have very little amount of users, but then still you don't get personal info.

But with my solution in the main Ask HN I don't need any ID. So why should I not do it that way?