harianus
Joined 11 years ago
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799
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Member since
Jun 3
Recent submissions
Comment · 7 years ago
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.
Comment · 7 years ago
Added Simple Analytics [1]
Comment · 7 years ago
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.
Comment · 7 years ago
Thanks! For others, listen to it here: https://www.vox.com/2018/7/18/17575156/mark-zuckerberg-inter...
Comment · 7 years ago
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!
Comment · 7 years ago
Yes, will definitely ask about that.
Comment · 7 years ago
Thanks. That would be interesting to know. One thing; what do you mean with measure it?
Comment · 7 years ago
Comment · 7 years ago
What do you mean? I think using CloudFront is not accurate enough if you use caching.
Comment · 7 years ago
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.
Comment · 7 years ago
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.
Comment · 7 years ago
> 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.
Comment · 7 years ago
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].
Comment · 7 years ago
Love what you are doing here. A few points:
1. I would rename the pixel.png to something like image.png. Never call your script anything like tracking, analytics, or pixel when you don't want to be blocked by ad blockers. We use hello.js and hello.gif. [1]
> Log file parsing is an old-skool but effective way of measuring the traffic to your site.
2. By using a pixel image you can bypass caching. When using server logs without the image you only get the non cached requests. So an image like you use is a better approach.
3. Your image is being cached. So if somebody revisits your website your image will not be loaded and you will not find anything in your logs. Just disable your etag and add a expiry date of the past.
Awesome that more and more people are replacing Google Analytics with more simple tools. GA is overly complicated and has not the best privacy mindset. I built Simple Analytics [2] as a privacy friendly alternative.
Creator of https://simpleanalytics.com and https://privacyfirstproducts.com