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Opt-out of Google Analytics #843

Open ssokolow opened 6 years ago

ssokolow commented 6 years ago

Re-creation of issue #52 as the original reporter chose to give up and close it.

Even if I don't provide a Google Analytics key, my profile and games pages have itch.io's GA code injected in them.

I would like to be able to disable this entirely and let people look at my pages without feeding Google's surveillance machine.

leafo commented 6 years ago

could you tell me more about why you want this feature? GA is embedded on effectively every page of the site. Letting a developer hide it from their project page isn't going to do a very good job of protecting their visitors from getting seen by google analytics if they go anywhere else on itch.io. There are many shared pages that we will not allow developers to control

I think generally it makes more sense to give users tools to opt out, using something like https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout

also for what it's worth, we've configured GA to anonymize user session data

ssokolow commented 6 years ago

There are several reasons I'd like this:

  1. When I can customize a page as heavily as the project page, I feel that, even if only subconsciously, visitors will assign responsibility differently for the things I can't control.
  2. If GA isn't on the project page, I can actually have a proper cookie consent mechanism for it, by telling users that clicking on any links on the page will act as consent.
  3. Given the existence of various opt-out tools (most generally, HOSTS files, uMatrix, NoScript, etc.), I find Google Analytics data to be of questionable utility without the availability of something based on HTTP server logs like awStats to identify what demographic skew has been introduced into the data by mechanisms which block some kinds of subrequests.