Analytics ⁽¹⁾

No, not statistics in itself. The problem I am writing about is website statistics, and it started a long time ago. Back in the day we simply used web server logs to analyse website traffic. One could see an incoming IP address and see where the associated browser went in the website. This worked well back then as websites were simple affairs and essentially all one big lump. Of course, this was an era when web servers were run almost in the spare time of those few IT (and indeed non-IT) that had any interest in the web. Back then I was not in the central IT team but I was afforded some latitude for experimenting with new things, especially when redundant hardware could be used. It was 1992 and the IMG tag was still in the realm of fantasy. Later, there were two open source packages that became very popular, one called Analog and the other Linklint. The former produced statistics about website visitors and the latter could be used to check for errors, missing pages for example. Analog could, when provided with valid data estimate which countries visitors were coming from, very useful when your organisation markets itself globally. Of course, the marketeers desired more. I was once asked to find out where everyone who only looked at our home page went next. Ok, where they visited another of our own web servers this was do-able, but the question was expanded to ask which of our competitors they visited next. This was new thinking, by which I mean thinking that one could not associate with any other media. For example, if the publisher of one newspaper wanted to know which other newspaper a person took after only glancing at their own it would need some form of physical surveillance, or perhaps a questionnaire. Neither would be particularly reliable, the questionnaire in particular. Enter, stage left, Google Analytics. I had attended a launch event – well of a sort anyway – where a new product was described which would enable one to search all across the web. The name? Google. We had rudimentary search products by this time but nothing like what was being described. Bells were ringing, but rather quietly. I think we could see back then that all of a sudden content has value, just not to us. But, Google search aside we later got wind of Google Analytics ad the bells got louder amongst those of us who could already see future issues. Google Analytics arrived with two quite major advantages. First, IT people no longer had to do anything, and second, the marketeers would have access to easy to understand graphs. But those of us who had this nagging voice about global surveillance and the fact that a corporate entity would effectively have access to data indicating where everyone browsed were ignored. Fast forward to the later times of the GDPR and the coming soon and already years late PECR replacement, cookie laws and all…