patrick.net

These days Google is a gigantic multinational mega-corp. But that’s understating it a little. Think of Google as a kind of Godzilla that slurps up data about its users at one end and craps out gold ingots at the other. It does both of these at huge scale. ...

Google is not a search engine

Google is an advertising platform. Everything it does, all of its products, are geared towards selling advertising. ... But they all exist to suck up more data so that it can become even better at selling advertising.

The way Google turns data into gold ingots is as follows:

Step 1: Google collects as much data about you as it can.
Step 2: Google uses this data to get to know you very very well: what you like, what you don’t like, whether you are pregnant, whether you are gay, where your friends live, where you spend your time, what you purchase online.
Step 3: Google uses its extensive knowledge of you to show you advertising that fits you like a tailor-made suit.
Step 4: Lots of gold ingots.
It’s called surveillance capitalism and it’s certainly not about giving you a great user experience, it’s about making money. ...

Combine this with the fact that Google has a monopoly on online advertising. Ok, actually that’s not true. It has a duopoly along with Facebook. ...

This mountain of gold ingots used to flow to newspapers and magazines – but no more. The result has been the decimation of local news and the magazine industry. It is true that news organizations have been terrible at innovation in the past three decades and now they have been steam-rollered as a result. Why is this bad? Read on.

Google’s success is not good for us as a society

Google’s success is good for Google and its shareholders. It’s not good for us, the consumers. We live in a world where local news is either stone dead or barely surviving. ...

So has the market done its magic and filled the gap? Has the creation part of creative destruction happened? Do we now have a better and superior solution for local news?

Nope. Online news articles are a hideous cluster-fuck of click-baiting headlines, cookie banners, privacy nightmares and top heavy with advertising and it’s mostly Google’s fault. ...

So what about Google Analytics?

Google is harvesting data across all of its products, so why pick on Google Analytics? Because for most of the products, if you choose to use them, it’s your data that is harvested. It’s different for Analytics. You as a web developer are making a choice that affects all of your users.

Google Analytics is the most popular website stats tool. More than 53% of all sites on the web track their visitors using Google Analytics. ...

When I first began to develop websites, it was a no-brainer to add Google Analytics to anything I created. It’s free! It’s good! It’s what everyone uses!

But actually it’s not that good really:

It’s a bloated script that affects your site speed
It’s overkill for the majority of site owners
It’s a privacy liability and requires an extensive privacy policy
It worsens the user experience due to the necessity of annoying prompts.
It’s blocked by many browsers (e.g. Firefox) so the data is not very accurate.
There are more reasons. You can read the full list here.

Has Google ever revealed what it does with data from Analytics internally? Nope. But we don’t even need to speculate. It seems pretty obvious to me that they’re using it to guzzle up even more data and to crap out ever more gold ingots.

So are there alternatives? Sure, there’s a bunch and some cost money. I think it’s money worth spending. For instance, there’s Plausible.io and there’s Fathom (which I use on this blog) and a whole load of self-hosted solutions.

I believe it is a moral imperative for web developers to think about the “free” tools they are using to provide their products. In the case of Google Analytics, the tool is only very superficially free. We are all paying the hidden costs.

If you want to make the world a better place, stop feeding the beast.