Usage of proprietary Google service "Google Analytics"

[Anth0rx]

I see that you are using Google Analytics as your web analytics service. Have you thought about switching to an alternative service? There is a free and open source project called Matomo. Relying on proprietary services for a free and open source project like Trustroots creates unnessecary dependencies. Switching to Matomo would break those dependencies regarding web analytics and would give the control of the data back to the project and its community.

[simison]

Hey! Thanks for the feedback. Yep we know Matomo/Piwik very well, we've tried it here at Trustroots and at other big projects like Hitchwiki. It's not even nearly as effective as GA and it's real pain to host at our scale. We don't really have the time and energy to host software like that; we are too busy building Trustroots instead.

We have a privacy page outlining all the similar services we use to build Trustroots, including instructions on how to opt-out from GA.

We rely a lot on external proprietary companies to run Trustroots; including hosting the servers, serving maps, geolocation search, server monitoring, some analytics, sending out transactional emails etc. We host some of the analytics software ourselves, but only where it makes sense. We very much trust e.g. our hosting company and email service provider — users obviously cannot opt-out from those since they're running at the backend. Google is different in that it runs in your browser and you can very well opt-out from it pretty easily.

Thanks for the heads up though, much appreciated!

[Anth0rx]

Thank you for your detailed answer. I understand what you mean :)

[guaka]

Topic on meta: https://meta.trustroots.org/t/replace-google-analytics-with-something-more-ethical/113/2