topics VS Plausible Analytics

The browser keeps track of he top 5 categories from this list of these 629 topics. https://github.com/patcg-individual-drafts/topics/blob/main/...

Other than when it returns a random topic, the browser only reveals a topic to a site if that site has observed the user on a site with that topic before.

Delete Chrome.

“The intent of the Topics API is to provide callers (including third-party ad-tech or advertising providers on the page that run script) with coarse-grained advertising topics that the page visitor might currently be interested in.”

https://github.com/patcg-individual-drafts/topics#the-api-an...

Those are the top-level categories. Each of them has subcategories which are more granular. Not all of them are public, from what I can tell. Here's an example of some that are. https://github.com/patcg-individual-drafts/topics/blob/main/...

https://github.com/patcg-individual-drafts/topics/blob/main/...

>knows that you are male and sees that you've been recently interested in dresses and panties, and this website happens to be a far-right-leaning activist website, and decides to dox you, or blackmail you, or forward this information to Ron DeSantis's administration for possible criminal prosecution, you're all good with that?

If you want to keep topics a secret you can just block them. Every week of your 5 topics that gets selected there is a 5% chance that a topic in replaced with a random one. If you see a user's topic is /Shopping/Apparel/Women's Clothing/Dresses it could be there by chance. It would also require the site to take out a bunch of ads on these women clothing sites hoping that one of your future website visitors would see your ad.

> You seem to be taking things that are factual, normal, everyday, aspects of the WHATWG working process and trying to imply that chrome is doing something unusual, or untoward with its process here, but it isn't. It's doing what is necessary to make a proposal with WHATWG: have a trial.

And yet, we've seen many such proposals go through this process because Chrome is paying lip service to it. Whatever Google wants it ships. And Google wants this.

As an adjacent (ads- and tracking-related) example: Google's FLoC flopped, hard. So they immediatey shipped the replacement Topics API [1] despite there being no consensus. E.g. Firefox is against [2] (but Chrome presents Firefox's position as "No signal" in the feature status). And despite the fact that its status is literally "individual proposal, not accepted" [3]

Do not assume any good intent on Google's part when it comes to Google's business interests. Their intent is always malicious until proven otherwise. And there have been fewer and fewer cases when they have been proven otherwise.

[1] https://chromestatus.com/feature/5680923054964736

[2] https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/622

[3] https://github.com/patcg-individual-drafts/topics

> [0] https://github.com/patcg-individual-drafts/topics/blob/main/...

Nice v1 at the end. We can assume that this list is final and will not be changed?

> nor (by policy) other kinds of sensitive PII.

Yeah, it just exposes interest in family planing, loans, ..., which we do know have absolutely no potential for abuse.

Or given the attempts to outlaw drag there is probably no potential way to use interest in Nail Care or Makeup in a negative fashion, right?

> Yes, if you assume the people who designed this API were idiots

I assume they are getting paid well to play the role.

It's related to Google's Topics API proposal, I guess. This new API automatically categorizes users into pre-defined "topics" that are inferred by the browser through a classifier model (basically matching the hostname with the classifier model). So, in the end, advertisers sent ads for these topics, and users within shall see them).

Don't take my word for it: WordPress treated FLoC as a security concern in 2021: https://make.wordpress.org/core/2021/04/18/proposal-treat-fl...

A good overview of the context: https://digiday.com/media/we-cant-un-floc-ourselves-googles-...

More detail: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/03/googles-floc-terrible-...

When it comes to Topics, it's essential that there be hands on the wheel at W3C that approach the solidification of e.g. the Topics taxonomy https://github.com/patcg-individual-drafts/topics/blob/main/... from a neutral perspective that takes into account the various ways in which proposed topics could be dangerous, and how strongly to word the specification to prevent it from creeping in increasingly privacy-eroding ways in the future.

I think a single Google Analytics alternative is pretty hard to pick considering that GA can be used to very much varying extents.

For simple and "detailed enough" insights, I enjoyed using Plausible (https://plausible.io/) in the past.

For more in depth analytics that give you a detailed view into your own product, PostHog.com seems to be by far the best and most popular option out there.

I could do the same exercise with Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager, but luckily I don't need to, since Plausible already did. A piece of advice, rip out Google Analytics and use Plausible instead. It first of all doesn't destroy your website, and secondly it doesn't violate the GDPR - So you can embed it on your site without having to warn your visitors about that they're being spied on by Google.

Also, currently we are using https://plausible.io/ for analytics. No other bugs.

I just swapped out Google Analytics with Plausible for AINIRO.IO. It’s only been a week, but so far I am super jazzed about it. First of all, Plausible doesn’t use cookies, so I can completely drop all cookie disclaimers and popups I had because of GDPR. Second of all, the site scores significantly better on load time. This results in a 10x better user experience for my website visitors, while making sure the website is still 100% conforming to GDPR laws.

No clue what you mean, browser cache might even clear itself without you doing anything manually. This thing makes no sense.

Nowhere ever did it say Tech Demo anywhere, not in the HN headline, not on the page itself. No, thanks. And even as a tech demo, there is nothing impressive going in. It is stores shit to local storage, I guess. Lol, I just looked this up, and it was in Firefox on 2009 already? WHAT? https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Window/loca... I never used it myself directly, but I remember reading about some API that kind of is the new version of cookies that can store more and better and I think that is it. 2009, I would swear what I think about was newer, maybe I am mixing something up, maybe not.

It has unnecessarily tracking from the comment above, not sure if it even sends all your notes to https://plausible.io, and I do not care. For me, this fails as a tech demo or whatever the fuck It's supposed to be. Sorry to not get all excited about everything posted here. In 2009 it for sure would ;)

If you already use Posthog, Web Analytics has been in Public Beta for quite some time.[1]

If I remember correctly, CloudFlare Analytics does not need you to register your domain with them. I personally feel keeping domain registration coupled with your DNS provider is not a good idea.

Plausible[2] has an Open Source self-hostable version but is not so updated in sync with their SaaS version.

Umami[3] is another simple, clean one. And, of course, as many have suggested, Matomo is the other well-established one. If you want to avoid maintaining a hosting routine, a lot do the hosting out of the box these days. PikaPods[4] was good when I tried and played around for a while.

1. https://posthog.com/docs/web-analytics

2. https://github.com/plausible/analytics

3. https://umami.is

4. https://www.pikapods.com

Plausible - Open Source Alternative to Google Analytics

There are many good, lightweight, and open-source alternatives to Google Analytics, such as Plausible, Matomo, Fathom, Simple Analytics, and so on. Many of these options are open-source, and can be self-hosted.

You log the IP address, referrer, user agent and the requested page URL but you don't set a unique cookie to identify the user.

This still gets you plenty of actionable analytics information: where geographically people are located (via GeoIP), what pages are most popular, what platforms (including desktop vs mobile) people are using.

I've been using https://plausible.io for analytics on a bunch of my sites for a couple of years now and I honestly don't miss the extra level of detail I got from cookie-based analytics I've used in the past.