Turning Off Google Analytics

When I first started building sites for the Web, I was captivated by visitor counters. I could write something, and see how many people came by! When I set up my own site, I checked in on the log file analysis every week to see where people were coming from. Eventually the thrill wore off, but I still wanted some long-term information on how my various sites were doing, so I set up Google Analytics.

Google Analytics was, in many ways, overkill, as none of my sites actively sell anything, I don't run campaigns, and my idea of a hard push for an article is occasional social media links. Most of the options in Google Analytics were unnecessary for me or even excessively complicating, but I let that that ride so I could check in occasionally.

The tradeoff, though, made less and less sense. GA gives me broad reporting about my site in exchange for detailed information about my visitors' activity. Google can see beyond the boundaries of my site to build its own much more comprehensive view of those visitors. That's pretty much the core of the surveillance web.

I've had growing doubts about the advertising surveillance model. It doesn't really make sense for me to share those doubts and surf the web with Privacy Badger running while sharing data from my own sites to the advertising industry.

Unlike many of you who are likely reading this and wondering why I've lost my mind, I don't have anything resembling a current need for the GA data. In the last five years I've visited the site probably three times, though I've been visiting it more for a while to make sure it's safely shut down. That definitely made chucking it an easier decision for me than for most of its customers. Lots of people I know have centered their businesses on GA and similar tools. They have harder decisions to make, especially as GDPR reminds us that data collection creates problems and tries to tackle them. They get to figure out compliance.

I also feel some fairly direct responsibility for the situation, having written a book on Cookies back before I realized they were the tip of the surveillance wedge, and having contributed to a variety of tech communities participating in these projects both for work and personally. It's not even just JavaScript and the Web - I kept meeting folks at Erlang shows who run advertising auctions. I've (happily at the time) edited books on Google Analytics itself.

Because my blog engine had died, I had an exciting weekend of search-and-replace to evict the GA code from 5500 static HTML pages. Sublime Text made it easier, and GA did a nice job of telling me my traffic had fallen to zero before I put GA in its own trash can. (I have to wait 35 days for that trash can to empty? Crazy.)

There's more to do, of course. I have no revenue from my sites, so I have little to fear from GDPR - but at the same time GDPR's approach to privacy seems right to me. After some aggravating overflows I keep minimal log data, but I could probably prune that down. It seems like the world could use a log analysis tool (or log alternative) that minimizes the personally identifiable information it keeps around, but I haven't found it yet.

If we're going to get out of this mess, we have to start somewhere. This is a tiny chip out of a vast edifice, but it's something.