I’m pretty principled. I block as much tracking as I can in my personal use of the web because what I do isn’t anyone’s business but my own. So, the idea that I have to put trackers on my site is pretty noxious to me, and I have thus far refused.
This isn’t an ad and I don’t want my personal account associated with my business, so no URLs, but I would like to know what you all think: is this something worthwhile that people will appreciate, or am I letting my principles guide me off a cliff because nobody cares that much?
If you’re controlling your own web server, the logs will give you plenty of data for analytical purposes without needing to be adding trackers.
It’s hosted, currently, but the logs can’t show things like heatmaps (where people click or hover their cursor), and I’d have to build a dashboard to display those stats.
But, this is interesting, because I’d still look at this as tracking. But maybe people are more okay if it’s not going to Google? Is it less about being tracked and more about not being tracked by Big Tech, do you think?
Logging is standard practice if you give even the slightest damn about security (read: you should), so I don’t see it as a problem. It’s what you use those logs for, how long they’re retained, and whether you sell them off.
So as long as you’re only using them for security auditing and website analytics and don’t keep them forever and don’t plan to sell them to data brokers, there’s really nothing to fret over. A good place to disclose how you use the logs, how long you retain them, and what is logged is in the site’s privacy policy.
Tracking where people click or hover their cursor sounds kinda creepy honestly. Like, why do you even need to know that stuff?
Doing it entirely yourself and not involving e.g. Google is infinitely better than Google, yeah, but it’s still pretty creepy and still worth blocking.
– Frost
Well, it does indicate which parts of your site are intuitive vs in need of improvement if you can see where people click and how long they spend looking at a given portion of the page.
But, like others have said, it’s of questionable utility in the age of smartphones on websites that don’t break the established design patterns, so I pretty much agree entirely that it’s unnecessarily invasive. At least, for my site!
I’m all with it from a consumer point of view as long as there is no sharing, no use beyond your own website & sales optimisation.
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You rolled your own analytics?
Also does it show 24 page views, 12 sessions, 0 visitors?