Hacker News Reader

Comment by orangepanda | Hacker News Reader

> for those who care about privacy.

As a user, I dont see tracking by specifically google being the problem; what I'm against is being tracked _at all_ - by anyone, self hosted or not.

There's "caring about privacy" in the subheadings, yet there's a whole section in docs about collecting private data [1]. Empty words.

I've used goaccess [2] in the past to provide traffic analytics. It reads from nginx/apache logs. You only get access to what browsers send anyway, and users who alter their user agents are in the minority, so they wont affect analytics much.

[1] https://github.com/electerious/Ackee/blob/1cf7779/docs/Anony...

[2] https://goaccess.io/

View on HN

Why do you consider some data your browser provides as private and some others not? Not saying I disagree, but hardliners could say they don't want what the browser provides in any way as tracked. Saying this app is hypocritical because they support a different notion of privacy is akin to saying your comment is hypocritical because you say you're against being tracked at all, then talk about tracking browsers via web server logs.

I think we need to recognize privacy as a spectrum and applaud self-hosted alternatives to traditional saas services even if they don't conform to your notion of tracking.

Browsers send too much information on their own, and they shouldn't. But there is still a huge difference between analyzing access logs and tracking users. When you actively track users you build complete profiles of people with any kind of information. Access logs do not go nearly as far, they're mostly limited to IP address, a few info about browser/OS type, and sometimes a referrer; most of which are easy to spoof.

Sounds like a difference in perspectives; you as a user think of data about you as personal and private, while an operator of a site using Ackee thinks of their sites' tracking data as private. Quite amusing, really. :)

I released an analytics tool earlier this week that doesn't collect PII or set cookies. All the tracking events are aggregated and you can't even see the tracking logs of a particular visitor or visitor's browser as with log based analytics.

https://github.com/sheshbabu/freshlytics

> What I'm against is being tracked _at all_ - by anyone, self hosted or not. > I've used goaccess. It reads from nginx/apache logs.

While I'm using GoAccess myself and I too recommend it over using JS libraries, your server logs usually contain private data as well (user agent, ip address).

> There's "caring about privacy" in the subheadings, yet there's a whole section in docs about collecting private data [1]. Empty words.

The advanced tracking is turned off by default. Ackee will never store a browsing history of a user and tries it best to keep tracked data anonymised.

It's all about finding a balance between privacy and analytics. At the end it's still an analytics tool and there would be nothing to show without data.

Using "nginx/apache logs" and "what browsers send anyway" is more than Ackee tracks by default. Storing and analysing this data isn't even allowed by the GDPR without asking the user.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com