[projectvrm] Fathom Analytics

[JClark < >]

Friends just shared this, thought it was relevant to the list.

Fathom Analytics, an alternative to Google

Stop scrolling through pages of reports and collecting gobs of personal data about your visitors, both of which you probably don’t need. Fathom is a simple and private website analytics platform that lets you focus on what's important: your business.

https://usefathom.com/

From their "Make your website a black hole to big tech" post:

Google analytics is present on at least 70% of all websites on the internet. So, not only does Google know what most of the world is searching for through it’s search engine, it also knows what most people are doing on most sites once they click links from the search engine.

That’s why Google doesn’t need to charge for Google Analytics, they get access to such a vast amount of our personal data. It’s one of the biggest tech monopolies ever. What they do with all of our data is unknown, as their track record for caring about digital privacy is horrendous.

With a monopoly like this, even privacy-focused companies like Mozilla, Tunnelbear, 1password, and Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1 DNS service use Google Analytics on their websites. The problem is, most websites tech stack just assumes Google Analytics will be installed. We don’t point this out to shame those companies, since it was part of our own tech stack as developers before we started Fathom.

We’d never advocate that you work to remove yourself from Google’s search engine in the name of privacy. If you’re a business, that’d be a bad move, since it can drive vast amounts of traffic to your site. But, what if we collectively stopped using Google on our websites? That way, once someone clicked off of their search engine, it became a complete black hole in terms of data Google would get.

This is why we’ve built Fathom Analytics. Our goal is huge but simple: to make as many websites as possible black holes for data to Google. Our analytics tracker doesn’t collect or share personal data, because our business model is almost the opposite of Google Analytics:

Fathom Analytics doesn’t sell data, we sell software.

It’s a very different business model.

[snip]