Web development and privacy

[jnaklaas]

As a web developer, I'm interested in creating websites that do not invade visitor's privacy. Currently, usually Google and Facebook track all our visitors. Since most website owners like to measure the results of their online marketing, the usually ask me to set up a Google Tag Manager. I'd love to see an extensive guide on how to do this without selling visitor data to Google and other large tech companies.

At this point we use Google services to

1. track our visitors (analytics);
2. do remarketing (when they're tracked, we can send the people who clicked an add before new adds);
3. protect our website forms (recaptcha);
4. have custom google fonts on our website;
5. enable marketeers to easily track specific buttons or links without me having to add extra code (google tag manager).

Is there any service that enables me to do the same without Google? I know about alternatives for tracking such as matomo analytics, and recaptcha alternatives such as hcaptcha or other self-hostes solutions. Thing is, most of them require a little more effort to set it all up. I'm not aware of alternatives to 2, 4 and 5.

Are there any resources on this? If not, I think it would be great to include it in privacyguides.

[d4rklynk]

Plausible Analytics is great

[dngray]

Indeed, we use it ourselves, as for a section on PG, it might be a little out of scope due to the number of items.

[jnaklaas]

I understand it might be out of scope, but not less relevant. If websites and applications wouldn't need to sell their user's privacy without compromising too much on the above, that would be a good thing for people's privacy.

[d4rklynk]

And no it won't be added on PG as PG is meant for average tech people for regular day-to-day use

[ph00lt0]

Google Fonts no alternative??? What about just putting the font on your own server :D
Generally better not to use so many custom fonts.. only slows down loading of the website, mostly it isn't necessary.

2 and 5 are evil, stop doing that, thank you.

[jnaklaas]

I agree 2 and 5 are evil, but my project manager and those marketing guys do not. In fact, they couldn't care less. I'm having a really hard time explaining people why privacy is important.

[ph00lt0]

Please don't take this as offense. There is so much work in our field at so many companies, why work there? I would jump ship.