remove google analytics and google recaptcha

mayeaux / nodetube

Open-source YouTube alternative that offers video, audio and image uploads, livestreaming and built-in monetization

MIT License

2.34k stars 262 forks source link

remove google analytics and google recaptcha #41

Open ghost opened 4 years ago

ghost commented 4 years ago

No one deserves to be tracked. User's privacy should be protected by default.

Let's not forget that recaptchas also create headaches for the tor users. We should find a better, privacy respecting solution. https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube/issues/1721#issuecomment-497932502

mayeaux commented 4 years ago

There's currently a flag in .env.settings that allows recaptcha to be turned off if desired. I can do the same thing with Google Analytics and I plan to have them both off by default.

ghost commented 4 years ago

There are enough alternatives (Matomo, Fathom, GoatCounter etc.) to google analytics so we could stripe it out completely. I don't see any reasons for keeping this spyware inside the repo, it's just bad PR for this project.

Since we don't yet have a reasonably efficient alternative to recaptcha - we could turn the recaptcha off by default for now.

mayeaux commented 4 years ago

I don't necessarily disagree with that, personally I've never heard of those alternatives you've listed, but since it's just a JavaScript widget my choice would be to leave it in there with the flag turned off. A lot of people like Google Analytics so it will be convenient to them, if others don't like it they can just keep it turned off. If more people complain about it I'd be happy to axe it and if others say they've used it that would make me lean towards keeping it, we'll see what the community thinks.

ghost commented 4 years ago

personally I've never heard of those alternatives you've listed

they're pretty big https://github.com/matomo-org/matomo - 13k stars https://github.com/usefathom/fathom - 6k stars etc So there are ethical alternatives and I believe we should not encourage the use of google analytics.

mayeaux commented 4 years ago

I tend to agree with you, how are the free tiers of the hosted version of those software? I used to use an open-source analytics project (name escapes me atm) but their hosted versions all cost too much that it was a bit cost prohibitive for me when I was just starting this project.

ghost commented 4 years ago

I tend to agree with you, how are the free tiers of the hosted version of those software?

They charge too much when they sell it to you as a service but you can take the software (since it's FOSS) and self-host it.

You can self-host it on your pine64 sbc or on a raspberry pi for FREE!
Or you could find a cheap $2/month hosting provider and self-host it there (it doesn't require many resources).
Alternatively you can sign up for a framaclick account for FREE https://framaclic.org/# (never tested this myself)

mayeaux commented 4 years ago

Yeah honestly that's why I don't mind to have GA in there with a flag, because it should definitely be off by default but if a young startup wants to use GA in a NodeTube instance to be as lean as possible I can't really blame them, can you? Maybe let's code up an implementation of matomo as well and then people can pick which is best for them, I think that would be nice from a developer/instance maintainer's perspective