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Comment by Klover | Hacker News Reader

That’s genius! Using trackers to research not using trackers.. so why don’t you use more privacy oriented analytics instead of google analytics? Matomo (formerly known as Piwik) seems like a better choice, unless that option is exactly what you’re researching.

I don’t mean to be so snarky. Your comment seems so hypocritical to me, though.

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I’ve been contributing to the privacy-first design of Fathom. https://usefathom.com/ I don’t use if myself as its not all that useful at this time. There is actually a second tracking system in place that records things like the number of people who block ads and analytics.

Google Analytics (GA) on the site is configured to delete data as early as possible and it’s configured to not store IPs or link activities. However, its the only way to get any page-level reporting (like which pages are profitable) out of AdSense.

It’s cute that you think asking a hostile actor to be nice and delete data early and not store some of it would actually work when their bottom line directly depends on them doing so.

They can very well pretend not to do it while secretly still tracking & storing everything.

Matomo has completely unacceptable impact on client-side page loading performance. The way it stores data also makes it difficult to do anything useful with the data.

ISTR that Matomo also has a log-analysis mode where you don't insert anything into your content, and therefore does not affect performance at all.

Ah. Log analysis hasn’t been useful for years. Browsers pre-fetch and pre-render documents that are never viewed by anyone. You need client-side scripting to know whether a request is for a human or just browsers trying to preemptively load things in expectation of user interaction.

I’m curious - could you explain that impact? I use Matomo and had not noticed it.

Lets just say their best-practices was last updated sometime in the early 2000s. It’s 2018 and their client-side tracker is synchronously executed and holds up the entire page.

This seems to contradict Findus23 claim that it loads async. Regardless, asnyc="async" can be manually added to script tags.

This is just plain wrong. Matomo is async by default[0].

I appreciate the difficulty of considering how to monetize content that you put a lot of effort in to, but spreading misinformation on the very same topics you are writing about is harmful and short-sighted. Your responses here moved me from “this seems like an interesting blog to follow” to “nope”.

[0] https://developer.matomo.org/guides/tracking-javascript-guid...

Just FYI: Matomo has nearly none impact to the loading performance as it is always loaded async and deferred (so only after the page has finished loading).

If this is still too slow for you, you could try the official QueuedTracking plugin [1], which tracks into a redis or mysql database and processes the requests afterwards. That way you should get to about 30ms for the request.

[1] https://plugins.matomo.org/QueuedTracking

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