pauljarvis

There's nothing misleading about that title, it's a valid and based on our legal analysis of what's been happening in the EU.

That said, I appreciate your comment, and I understand how you feel. Let me explain why I feel the "6 months in jail" blog post is valid.

Per the law in question: "Violation of a ban [on Google Analytics] issued by the Danish Data Protection Agency is punishable pursuant to the Data Protection Act, section 41, subsection. 2, no. 4, with a fine or imprisonment for up to 6 months, cf. section 41, subsection 1.”

Just because no one has been jailed yet, doesn't mean a law is not valid. The title of the blog post is directly related to the law we talk about in the blog post. So it's not misleading, we're simply relying factual, legal information.

We take privacy and privacy law very seriously, as it’s the cornerstone of our company, and the highest value that we’ve got. So we share these legal rules, not to generate misleading information or clickbait, but because it’s something we care a great deal about. And, our customers value our analysis of these privacy laws (through our lawyers and privacy officer).

Hope that helps shed some light on the blog post title. And we always appreciate feedback (it’s why most of the decisions about our software were made = feedback from folks).

We actually looked into this:

https://usefathom.com/blog/google-analytics-seo

Funny as it sounds, using Fathom instead of GA could increase your SEO rankings :)

Your stats are wholly incomplete compared to Fathom, lack any kind of GUI, graphs, or date-based filters. I think the comparison in speed is like comparing an apple to an elephant :)

Nah, #Firefox4life ;)

Not all businesses use ads or data studio though. Those folks are looking for quick and easy stats they can use to run their business, like what content is popular, what referrals are driving traffic. And, if they're a business, they are making money, and at least some can afford to pay for expenses like website analytics. Like all software, it's not for everyone in every situation, but it is for certain folks in certain situations.

You're most welcome!

"best" is however you define the term :)

Agreed!

lolololol

Appreciate the note and thought here. I do disagree though, as it feels like the spirit of GDPR is to make into law the protection and privacy for regular people. Fathom does this to the best of our ability, and our code reflects our agreement with the spirit of the law.

Analytics is required for business and isn't going anywhere. The laws don't feel like they are trying to shut down analytics completely, they are just asking this type of software to do better. That's what I think we are doing with this—and there are no other analytics companies who come close to our level of obfuscation and non-tracking of personal data.

If the intent of the law is do better with privacy and data, we are doing it to the best of our abilities. It's not a skirting around the issue, we are agreeing with it in our code and logic for how our tracker works.

So it's not as easy as just pushing the update to the repo. We are still committed to open-source, but we also have a business to run and need to make a living here (we're two dudes who care about privacy, not a huge company with deep pockets) :)

The community version is getting a full update soon. We just have to focus on profit a bit (this keeps us in business and able to update the repo).

Totally fair, as that's an opinion :) Luckily our customers are happy with the price, and other folks use the open-source (100% free) version. Cheers!

We are incredibly open to any ideas, comments or concerns on how we're doing this. This is a big step up from what we had previously, but there’s always room for improvement. Happy to hear thoughts in the comments.

Love seeing that folks are using the nomenclature from my book and creating new things from it!

this looks great bruno!

https://pjrvs.com - it's simple, but it sure does work for me. I'm a writer and entrepreneur.

Fathom has a one-click on DO now too, for $5/mo. Although if countly is working for ya, I wouldn't switch either.

I've had Fathom on my sites for almost a year, no difference in ranking that I've seen.

Fathom has custom date periods now. And yes, Fathom is meant to give the basics that most non-pro users require. It's a one-page dashboard.

We're working on this for Fathom (I'm the cofounder of Fathom).

Our source code is open-source, you can view it here: https://github.com/usefathom/fathom

That's another way we're transparent. Anyone who knows code can see exactly how we collect data and what data we collect.

I can only speak to Fathom (since that's my product), but we have no personal data to sell if we sold our product. We collect nothing about website visitors other than a tick in the aggregate data. So if we sold our business, there's zero personal information from website visitors on any of our customers dashboards that could be used against them.

this looks pretty cool!

Fathom thought about data and privacy policy too:

https://usefathom.com/data/

fair enough, i'll update the copy now.

author of that line here: i don't want to live in a world where companies can't have a little fun with some copy.

jarod lanier and ezra klein talk about this in a recent episode of klein's show: companies can become more durable and much more aligned with the needs of their customers if they get paid directly by those customers (instead of selling those customers and making money off a third party, like advertisers).

i miss haveamint! that's one of the reasons we're making fathom, there were decent + simple options before, so we wanted to take a stab at making one too.

while i 100% agree with you that our demo (hi! i'm author 2/2 of this software) should just log you in without asking for credentials... we're 100% focused on the product right now, and being near the top of HN was a huge surprise to us as well.

we are working on ironing out the UX of our site (it's a single column of text, that we whipped together in an hour, so we could focus on building the software). so it's completely a work in progress at this particular moment.

Great article!