81 lines
4.0 KiB
Markdown
81 lines
4.0 KiB
Markdown
---
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title: "Privacy-respecting analytics"
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date: 2023-03-06T12:23:00-05:00
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cover: ./cover.png
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categories: ["Technology"]
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tags: ["Privacy", "Web"]
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draft: false
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toc: false
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---
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For a long time, I was so vehemently opposed to analytics on personal websites
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that I condemned people using privacy-respecting systems like [Plausible] on
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their blog, shouting about mUh PrIvAcY and saying that these platforms only
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boosted the bloggers' ego and they would end up writing for their readers rather
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than personal enjoyment. I'm realising that I was kinda dumb 🤔
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[Plausible]: https://plausible.io/
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One of my clients recently asked me to add analytics to the website I created
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for them. I said yes and asked whether they had a preference as to which
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analytics system. They said no, they just wanted to see how many people were
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using the website and whether they were actually looking at the menu and store
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pages. I decided to set them up with [Umami] because it has a very simple UI,
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it's not affiliated with Big Tech™ companies, [it's GDPR-compliant,](umami-gdpr)
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and the script is only 2 KBs.
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[Umami]: https://umami.is/
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[umami-gdpr]: https://umami.is/docs/faq
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Analytics on a business's website is a no-brainer. Business websites should be
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pleasant, ergonomic, and useful for their customers and analytics do assist with
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that goal. But what about on personal websites? The big reason Google Analytics
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is so often condemned is because of Google; you bet your ass they're aggregating
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all the data they harvest from their collective properties and associating that
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information with your visitors' profiles (yes, even if they don't have a Google
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account) to improve their advertising engine. Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, etc. do
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exactly the same thing with all of their like/share buttons. They're ingesting
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as much data as they can to feed their ad systems and I don't want to further
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their mass surveillance of the internet.
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The privacy issues with analytics primarily apply to the big providers that
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aggregate everything across their customers' properties in order to surveil as
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many people as possible. Systems like Umami are different. The minimal data
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that's collected is anonymised and stays in-house, on your (preferrably)
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self-hosted server. When you really give it some thought, there's nothing
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inherently wrong with knowing how many visitors your site has, what pages
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they're viewing, and what website they came from.
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I enabled Umami on my website shortly after coming to this realisation and [made
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the analytics page public.][public]
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[public]: https://umami.secluded.site/share/7PNXq2e8/Secluded.Site
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The referrers section is fascinating when you bump the period from "Today" to
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"All time". There are some unusual search engines, a couple onion addresses,
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another of my own websites [(scratchanitch.dev)][sai], and even some personal
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ones. After seeing other individuals link to my website, I had the idea to use
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GitHub's [Code Search] feature to poke around and see [where else it was
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mentioned.][cs-results]
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[sai]: https://scratchanitch.dev/
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[Code Search]: https://github.com/features/code-search/
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[cs-results]: https://github.com/search?q=%22secluded.site%22&type=code
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A suprising number of people seem to be referencing my _[Vim as a Markdown
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Editor][vme]_ post. I haven't thought about that post since I wrote it, much
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less updated it. Taking a look at Umami indicates that it's by far my most
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popular one. Maybe I should have another look at it and see if there's anything
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that needs to be improved ...
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[vme]: https://secluded.site/vim-as-a-markdown-editor/
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Knowing that there are people visiting my site and that some of the things I've
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written are useful is, frankly, quite encouraging. That's why I'm writing this
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post. That's part of what inspired my next one and it's why I intend to start
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writing more. I do enjoy writing, but the idea of tossing something I've spent
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hours on into the void of the internet isn't exactly motivating.
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As long as it isn't causing problems, I don't believe "boosting the blogger's
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ego" is inherently bad. Encouragement can be quite good 🙂
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