I’ve recently been thinking about turning a few things off.
In fact, I have recently actually begun turning things off. For example, Google Analytics.
Now, I’m on the laissez faire side of not-at-all-panic in relation to GDPR, by which I mean, I basically think everything will be fine, nobody will be fined, except the actual targets of the Regulations… you know, massive mega corps for whom 4% of global revenue will be a significant sum.
But, I have been studying up on and talking around the subject of GDPR with developers in somewhat of a leadership – or hearts and minds – role with Silicon Dales and in a personal consultancy capacity too.
I think this privacy thing is well overdue. We all needed a bit of a shunt when it comes to a blase attitude to private and personal data.
This is not new for me. You may be aware from previous posts that I don’t for example, ever post photographs of my children online. The reason for this is I don’t think it is fair for their future selves, not being able to consent to my doing this for them. So I pay them the respect of deciding for themselves, later.
That’s just an example. I take privacy and personal consent very seriously – and I think that businesses who also pay respect to personal privacy will win our respect in the long run and make so much more $$$ too. So really, it will pay to have respect for the personal privacy rights of one and all, whether or not you’d like to use that data today for some purpose or another.
So anyway. Google Analytics. I don’t think that this is a privacy issue, at all, really. Its all suitably anonymised, at least the way I use it, but I did find myself repeatedly saying to clients “but do you actually use this data, in any meaningful way, to achieve anything actionable for your business (or website)?”
Well, many answers were “no, actually, we haven’t even looked at Google Analytics at all for over a year,” or something like “erm… what’s Google Analytics!”
Naturally, there are some great reasons to use Google Analytics. I mean, advanced eCommerce tracking, connected properly (HINT: that’s what I do), is really the cat’s pyjamas when it comes to data about your customers, how they interact with your store, what they are buying, where they came from and etc etc etc. It helps you to build better experiences.
But this is my personal blog, so I’ve decided, since I don’t use it for any meaningful purpose that pfffft, Google Analytics is no more. I’ve done this in several places. May Day was the day that stuff all went. It seemed an appropriate time to bail out. At least its somewhat poetic; or, at least, its kind of melodramatic.
In any case, the Google Analytics have bitten the dust. So, as the title suggests, since I’ve not received a comment in coming up 1 year since re-purposing this personal website as an all-purpose blog… do comments need to go the same way?
Leave a comment, below 🙂 if only so I know someone is reading, right 😉
I’m back again, and writing a new blog on a new seldom visited domain, and using your Fastest Website In The World post as a benchmark for my ongoing ‘Need For Speed’ since I wrote a blog post and a hefty comment on your post from back then.
Well I noticed the new addition of a screenshot of Pingdom on that post, and it was only when I did a double take on those Pingdom results (from Sweden) that I noticed the URL was actually referencing this post.
It’s interesting what you’ve written about Google Analytics as it happens for me, considering I barely visit GA at all these days, as I seem to get a lot more meaningful data elsewhere (based on my personal needs, which are somewhat different the needs of busier websites).
Suffice to say, I’m here and commenting and whilst I respect your decision (way back when you wrote this) to ditch GA, I hope I have posed a valid argument for keeping comments, on the basis that they are still moderated. It wouldn’t bother me so much as and when a comment is approved though, because email notifications usually help the necessary delays of human approval. Worst comes to worst, I’ll be back in the next few years when I obsess over what is currently the fastest website in the world.
An arguably meaningless quest to once again draw inspiration by searching for the fastest (WordPress) websites in the world is surely coming to an end as I get back to comparing speeds before and after a migration of my latest personal blog from an AWS Lightsail VPS to my preferred low-cost VPS using Litespeed. It will be interesting without doing much actual sysadmin work to see how my web pages stack up in terms of speed, and especially compared to so many familiar web pages where I’ve seen some surprisingly slow LCP metrics.