What to do about Plausible and Fathom

This arises from Migrating away from Google Analytics that’s rising on Hacker News, right now.

The article recommends Plausible and Fathom as alternatives to Google Analytics.

This raises a number of questions, and I welcome input on this.

• Plausible serves its tracking JavaScript from the root domain. So if we block Plausible, we block all of Plausible including its website. Blocking plausible.io blocks it all.

• I’m interested in hearing opinions on the following: Does ethical tracking exist and, if so, how do we treat that?

My gut feeling: block because this isn’t ethical tracking since user consent never enters.

What do you think?

[Blake-]

(I am writing all this assuming I know enough about Plausible & Fathom to have an informed opinion, I could be wrong)

My gut feeling: DON’T block. I guess I agree, technically this isn’t ethical tracking for the stated reason. BUT, these two services are really doing tracking in the best possible way. What I’m doing on a website isn’t sold on the open market, it’s not traded, and it’s not added to my footprints of where I go all day on the web. It’s one site that is trying to figure out what I’m doing on that site. I feel like what I (as a site owner) can get from these is just a bit more than I could get from just plain old Apache logs. And what I (as a site user) give up is not something that concerns me at all. It’s not part of any larger system, it’s just what I did at that site. These are two thing I’d like to see succeed. I use neither, and have no vested interest in either, I just want better analytics things like these to be used more. Hopefully more people start to use them and move away from GA.

[Booligoosh]

I feel like a lot of this comes down to what “track” means, and what I as an average user am expecting when I enable “do not track”.

Personally, I feel like “track” means following me across multiple websites, or keeping a detailed record of my individual browsing habits on an individual site.

If you think about what “tracking” means in real life, it means constantly following someone/something or monitoring it. If someone had one of those little infrared foot traffic counter things at the door to their shop, I wouldn’t say they’re tracking me as an individual. They’re tracking how much foot traffic they get, but they’re not tracking me.

Both Plausible and Fathom are just like this. They don’t keep the same user identifiers for more than 24h, they just take an anonymous count when you walk in the door to a site (along with a few other anonymous things like referrer). In short, as a user, I don’t feel like my individual activity is being tracked to create a profile of my browsing, I just feel like the website is counting me when I walk in the door. They’re tracking their visit stats, but they’re not tracking ME.

As cause enabling DNT, what I’m saying and expecting is “do not track ME”. It’s fine to track your usage stats, but don’t track ME and build a profile of ME. So I would not expect services like Plausible and Fathom to do anything about this header, since they’re not tracking me as an individual in the first place.