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Comment by binkethy | Hacker News Reader

Stop using Google Analytics and your need to place cookies and thus need for cookie popups vanishes.

Goatcounter or Plausible will do fine. Some decent frontend log parsing will also be a viable strategy.

Stop feeding Google your customers data for free.

They mostly use it to monitor (and automate) how successful ads are. Plausible is not a drop-in replacement for such use cases.

You have sales data for that.

Have you ever seen a marketeer say no to more data?

Because it is there: don't make them choose; we have x and nothing more so you cannot have more.

Yeah but there's the rub. Asking Google to take analytics away just isn't going to happen. It makes them billions.

And marketeers want this data because sales data only tells them where they succeeded. Not where they failed to sell, which is more interesting to them because that's where the growth is found.

It'll be really hard to wean them off this.

The EU can simply tell them they can no longer operate Analytics. Too bad if it's hard on Google. They are a preditory company that violates privacy rights. There is clearly competition in the markets they serve. Any threat of complete exit is empty. Those competitors are more than willing to gain any market they exit. These companies need to be put in check by the government or a regulatory body. Marketing and Advertising are toxic to the internet.

> The EU can simply tell them they can no longer operate Analytics. Too bad if it's hard on Google.

No they can't. The US doesn't even let them decide whether to supply chip machines to China. Or for Schiphol Airport to reduce slots for noise abatement. the US immediately trumped up diplomacy and raised threats to stop those things.

Banning google analytics is just unthinkable in the current relationship between EU and US. I agree they are a predatory company but this is unfortunately how things are right now in the balance of power.

This is why the AdNauseam extension is so hated by Google et al. It doesn't eliminate ads but rather fights against them using a different approach: polluting the well. It is built on Ublock Origin so it indeed blocks ads, but aside doing that it also silently clicks on all of them so that data collected by advertising companies suddenly become useless. https://adnauseam.io/

I don’t get the argument. Sure it makes Google ad targeting worse, why would Google care? They have monopoly power in online ads and targeting doesn’t work that well anyway. As long as people keep buying the gimmick, no amount of bad data will amount to anything.

The argument is that if enough people do it it's causes them to lose some amount of money and maybe even lose customers.

Yeah and not enough people do it. That's the biggest problem.

If enough people do it, it will have an effect. Remember when Apple pulled the advertiser ID unless users opted in? That really got the ad industry barking. That they feel. Ad Nauseam they don't. It's way too fringey.

That is why we have GDPR in a first place. But apparently we need something more strict then.

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