Great for plausible.io of course. But what is the difference for the end user?
- GDPR: hosted in EU vs US, so your data is traveling less far. The things the plausible can do with the data is more or less the same.
- No cookies: don't see the point of that tbh, they will probably perform even more invasive tricks like finger printing to replace the cookie requirement
Bottom line, the website visitors data is still logged, stored and tracked - only now with a different actor.
It’s like two dudes developing the solution and more importantly, charging you for it. If you don’t see the radical difference in incentive structures, then I don’t know what to tell you.
Sorry, had a bit of time left today. Its more like 7 dudes, and their whole proposition is underwhelming TBH. Mostly gratuite statements against the ruling order. Half their website is a rant against the 'capitalist' competition. And the whole Christmas tree of doing good is exposed. But nothing really sticks:
- Simple and easy: wait until the product matures
- Open source: but no foundational governance, like Apache for example.
- Promise never to sell to investors, but nothing is in place to actually prevent that from happening. Note this common practice via a social enterprise.
- 45 kg reduction of CO2 compared to Google per average website(!): clear violation of EU law (2006/114/EG) in my opinion.
- They suggest to proxy their service to circumvent consumers who actively block traffic to plausible. This is OK, because they are good.[0]
> they will probably perform even more invasive tricks like finger printing to replace the cookie requirement
It's clear you didn't even bother to look at plausibles data policy [1] before assuming what it does and doesn't collect.
The TL;DR: it does not fingerprint, and it does not collect any identifiable information, be it about your device or your person.
> Bottom line, the website visitors data is still logged, stored and tracked - only now with a different actor.
Only basic device info is logged (not even IP addresses are stored). And it's very easy to self host so that different actor may be yourself.
I indeed do not know Plausible and any of their motivations.
Google Analytics also does not provide PII to their end users per se. But I have seen many tools and solutions do just about anything to circumvent that. Merging analytics with transactional data and site logs. Adding company info to visitor data. There is an entire industry there.
So, an imaginable use case would be to self host it. Intercept to circumvent the limitation.
The reason why I am so cynical is not because of the motivations of Google Analytics or Plausible. It is what motivates the end users, the companies who are using these statistics.
I do know Plausible, and their motivation is to make a sustainable business providing basic web analytics, which is why they charge for their service and Google doesn't. The data they provide to the users of their service is like an order of magnitude less detailed than what Google provides.
I get the cynicism about the industry in general since Google led this merger between web analytics and advertising, but there are plenty of providers in the analytics space that aren't following that path.
But then you still do the same thing, but you host it yourself. Meaning: it is installed and left running for years without updates and monitoring. I then rather have Google handle things.
- GDPR: hosted in EU vs US, so your data is traveling less far. The things the plausible can do with the data is more or less the same.
- No cookies: don't see the point of that tbh, they will probably perform even more invasive tricks like finger printing to replace the cookie requirement
Bottom line, the website visitors data is still logged, stored and tracked - only now with a different actor.