Does anyone happen to know of a service like this that is free (not self hosted) for non-commercial, low-traffic sites? Or which costs less than ~$10 per year.
I have a basic Github Pages site, and I currently don't know whether anyone is looking at it, beyond the very few who take the time to email me. I don't need (or want) to know anything about my visitors, but it would be nice to know that I'm not simply tossing stuff into the ether.
I thought that with the recent changes to PECR they that clarified any non-essential cookie-like technology needs permission, irrespective of whether it's first party or pseudonymous. And additionally that analytics does not count as strictly necessary.
To be fair, most of them probably do. It's not like the introduction of GDPR in Europe 2 years ago suddenly made all of the shit a marketing dept shoves into Google Tag Manager completely legit and above board.
These third parties will take what you give them and _also_ take what they can get from your browser if you're embedding their script. Are you going to proxy those scripts as well to stop them getting the user's IP address and then geolocating it to grab even more info?
The cookie warning banner is bullshit only in the sense that it achieves nothing. Accept it or deny it, it won't change a thing. Same with the tracking consent popups: despite the law saying they should be opt-in by default, they're still treated as opt-out by default, meaning that all of these sites _still_ collect your data because you're blacklisting individual sites from tracking, as opposed to whitelisting them. You need to set a cookie to say that you don't want tracking and not thousands of cookies to say you do want it?
That's being tracked... it's all wrong. Literally everything you offer as information, or don't offer, is another node in their graph.
Or they treat continuing to use the site as consent. Some of them are really passive-aggressive about it too. I've seen cookie banners with wording like "We use cookies, because duh, who doesn't in 2020? Click here or keep using the site to accept."
Completely at odds with the whole "informed consent" thing.
And then they wonder why we use things like uBlock, which are pretty much the only tools we can rely on to genuinely revoke consent. Or revoke as much of it as possible.
I have nothing directly against cloudflare but I think it would be better to try to support one of the smaller analytics companies if possible. They are the ones who made products that got big companies like cloudflare interested in the space.
Few years back I created some HelloWorld application on Google's AppEngine (requires Java, Python or Go) and was positively surprised about its statistics on theirs dashboard.
I get requests to /wp-login.php (and the like) on my simple Haskell web app hosted on my university's servers. They're quite persistent and I'm not even sure how found the URL to my app in the first place (the format is something like universityname.com/~userid/projectname, and I haven't linked it anywhere).
https://simpleanalytics.com/
Says this on their homepage:
We don't use cookies or collect any personal data. So no cookie banners, GDPR, CCPA, or PECR to worry about.
Seems like a cool company/project to me.
But, it's not free :(
$19/mo
Still thought it's worth pointing out.
I have a basic Github Pages site, and I currently don't know whether anyone is looking at it, beyond the very few who take the time to email me. I don't need (or want) to know anything about my visitors, but it would be nice to know that I'm not simply tossing stuff into the ether.