You Can Just Say No to the Data - Jim Nielsen’s Blog
Appealing to data as the ultimate authority — especially when fueled by engineered desire — isn’t neutrality, it’s an abdication of responsibility.
Link tags: analytics
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The environmental benefits of privacy-focussed web design - Root Web Design Studio
Even the smallest of business websites now seems to have cookie popups simultaneously telling us they ‘value your privacy’ while harvesting data about who we are, where we are, what we’re looking for and what we were doing online before we landed there.
Tracking scripts have become so pervasive that they have effectively become an industry standard, and most businesses deploy them not only without question, but without consideration of what it means for customer privacy.
Counting Ghosts
Analytics serves as a proxy for understanding people, a crutch we lean into. Until eventually, instead of solving problems, we are just sitting at our computer counting ghosts.
This article is spot-on!
I don’t want your data – Manu
I don’t run analytics on this website. I don’t care which articles you read, I don’t care if you read them. I don’t care about which post is the most read or the most clicked. I don’t A/B test, I don’t try to overthink my content.
Same!
Jacques Corby-Tuech - Marketers are Addicted to Bad Data
We’ve got click rates, impressions, conversion rates, open rates, ROAS, pageviews, bounces rates, ROI, CPM, CPC, impression share, average position, sessions, channels, landing pages, KPI after never ending KPI.
That’d be fine if all this shit meant something and we knew how to interpret it. But it doesn’t and we don’t.
The reality is much simpler, and therefore much more complex. Most of us don’t understand how data is collected, how these mechanisms work and most importantly where and how they don’t work.
Email Tracking and Paperless Banking – Dan Q
Even if you can somehow justify using tracking technologies (which don’t work reliably) to make general, statistical decisions (“fewer people open our emails when the subject contains the word ‘overdraft’!”), you can’t make individual decisions based on them. That’s just wrong.
On User Tracking and Industry Standards on Privacy | CSS-Tricks
Prompted by my post on tracking, Chris does some soul searching about his own use of tracking.
I’m interested not just in the ethical concerns and my long-time complacency with industry norms, but also as someone who very literally sells advertising.
He brings up the point that advertisers expect to know how many people opened a particular email and how many people clicked on a particular link. I’m sure that’s right, but it’s also beside the point: what matters is how the receiver of the email feels about having that information tracked. If they haven’t given you permission to do it, you can’t just assume they’re okay with it.
Thank You For Reading - Jim Nielsen’s Blog
Your attentive kindness doesn’t get picked up by any analytical tool I’ve got other than my heart and my memory—however short lived.
Some long-winded thoughts on privacy policies and consent popups — Piper Haywood
A deep dive into GDPR.
Got Google Analytics on your site? You should probably read this.
A quick look at privacy-focused analytics for small sites
A round-up of alternatives to Google Analytics.
Simple Analytics - Simple, clean, and privacy-friendly analytics
Another nice alternative to Google Analytics with a focus on privacy.
No cookie for you - The GitHub Blog
I wish more companies would realise that this is a perfectly reasonable approach to take:
We decided to look for a solution. After a brief search, we found one: just don’t use any non-essential cookies. Pretty simple, really. 🤔
So, we have removed all non-essential cookies from GitHub, and visiting our website does not send any information to third-party analytics services.
Cloudflare’s privacy-first Web Analytics is now available for everyone
Cloudfare’s alternative to Google Analytics is now available—for free—regardless of whether your a Cloudflare customer or not:
Being privacy-first means we don’t track individual users for the purposes of serving analytics. We don’t use any client-side state (like cookies or localStorage) for analytics purposes. Cloudflare also doesn’t track users over time via their IP address, User Agent string, or any other immutable attributes for the purposes of displaying analytics — we consider “fingerprinting” even more intrusive than cookies, because users have no way to opt out.
CSS Stats
A handy tool for getting an overview of your site’s CSS:
CSS Stats provides analytics and visualizations for your stylesheets. This information can be used to improve consistency in your design, track performance of your app, and diagnose complex areas before it snowballs out of control.
Plausible Analytics | Simple, privacy-friendly alternative to Google Analytics
Another alternative to Google Analytics—nice and lightweight too!
Phantom Analyzer
A simple, real-time website scanner to see what invisible creepers are lurking in the shadows and collecting information about you.
Looks good for adactio.com, thesession.org, and huffduffer.com …but clearleft.com is letting the side down.
The last tracker was just removed from Basecamp.com - Signal v. Noise
Can you believe we used to willingly tell Google about every single visitor to basecamp.com by way of Google Analytics? Letting them collect every last byte of information possible through the spying eye of their tracking pixel. Ugh.
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In this new world, it feels like an obligation to make sure we’re not aiding and abetting those who seek to exploit our data. Those who hoard every little clue in order to piece of together a puzzle that’ll ultimately reveal all our weakest points and moments, then sell that picture to the highest bidder.
Quitting Analytics
What over a decade of number-crunching analytics has taught me is that spending an hour writing, sharing, or helping someone is infinitely more valuable than spending that hour swimming through numbers. Moreover, trying to juice the numbers almost invariably divorces you from thinking about customers and understanding people. On the surface, it seems like a convenient proxy, but it’s not. They’re just numbers. If you’re searching for business insights, talking to real people beats raw data any day. It’s not as convenient, but when is anything worth doing convenient?