HN user

pauljarvis

327 karma
Posts51
Comments57
View on HN
usefathom.com 4y ago

Google FLoC is dead; long live Google Topics

pauljarvis
3pts0
usefathom.com 4y ago

Website analytics are breaking the law

pauljarvis
10pts3
usefathom.com 4y ago

Our small company built EU Isolation to comply with GDPR

pauljarvis
2pts0
usefathom.com 4y ago

The risk of out-of-office emails

pauljarvis
8pts1
usefathom.com 4y ago

Why a bootstrapper raised Venture Capital

pauljarvis
3pts0
usefathom.com 5y ago

A letter to US and EU policy makers to ban surveillance-based advertising

pauljarvis
5pts0
usefathom.com 5y ago

We prioritize support over sales in our SaaS business

pauljarvis
3pts0
usefathom.com 5y ago

Why HEY wanted to take on Gmail

pauljarvis
2pts0
usefathom.com 5y ago

Why digital privacy matters even more in 2021

pauljarvis
2pts0
usephantom.com 5y ago

Show HN: A Halloween-themed website scanner to see what trackers are lurking

pauljarvis
2pts0
usefathom.com 5y ago

Does targeted digital advertising work?

pauljarvis
1pts0
usefathom.com 5y ago

10M page views in a few hours for an analytics platform

pauljarvis
6pts1
usefathom.com 6y ago

Battle of the simple, privacy-focused analytics products

pauljarvis
3pts13
brycewray.com 6y ago

A better way to analyze Web sites

pauljarvis
3pts0
usefathom.com 6y ago

Does removing Google Analytics hurt your search engine ranking?

pauljarvis
3pts0
usefathom.com 6y ago

What we’ve learned about digital privacy through a 1,500 person survey

pauljarvis
2pts0
usefathom.com 6y ago

SaaS Focusing on SMB Instead of Enterprise?

pauljarvis
2pts0
usefathom.com 6y ago

From almost shutting down Fathom Analytics to tripling our MRR

pauljarvis
5pts2
usefathom.com 6y ago

Using Statamic to build a custom theme

pauljarvis
1pts0
pjrvs.com 6y ago

I rebuilt my blog using a flat-file CMS (Statamic), powered by Laravel

pauljarvis
2pts0
news.ycombinator.com 6y ago

Ask HN: Who has the best personal website/blog?

pauljarvis
114pts33
pjrvs.com 6y ago

But I have nothing to hide

pauljarvis
4pts0
usefathom.com 7y ago

How we built a GDPR-compliant website analytics platform without using cookies

pauljarvis
207pts120
www.fastcompany.com 7y ago

It’s Time to Ditch Google Analytics

pauljarvis
80pts37
www.fullstackradio.com 7y ago

Why it's important to define what “enough” is for your business

pauljarvis
2pts0
coinscore.website 8y ago

Bitcoin high score

pauljarvis
1pts0
www.indiehackers.com 8y ago

Running a minimalist business

pauljarvis
2pts0
emojibombs.com 10y ago

Emojibombs [MVP built in a single day]

pauljarvis
5pts0
pjrvs.com 10y ago

Do you qualify clients?

pauljarvis
6pts1
creativeclass.io 10y ago

Getting Sued

pauljarvis
2pts0

There's nothing misleading about that title, it's a valid and based on our legal analysis of what's been happening in the EU.

That said, I appreciate your comment, and I understand how you feel. Let me explain why I feel the "6 months in jail" blog post is valid.

Per the law in question: "Violation of a ban [on Google Analytics] issued by the Danish Data Protection Agency is punishable pursuant to the Data Protection Act, section 41, subsection. 2, no. 4, with a fine or imprisonment for up to 6 months, cf. section 41, subsection 1.”

Just because no one has been jailed yet, doesn't mean a law is not valid. The title of the blog post is directly related to the law we talk about in the blog post. So it's not misleading, we're simply relying factual, legal information.

We take privacy and privacy law very seriously, as it’s the cornerstone of our company, and the highest value that we’ve got. So we share these legal rules, not to generate misleading information or clickbait, but because it’s something we care a great deal about. And, our customers value our analysis of these privacy laws (through our lawyers and privacy officer).

Hope that helps shed some light on the blog post title. And we always appreciate feedback (it’s why most of the decisions about our software were made = feedback from folks).

Not all businesses use ads or data studio though. Those folks are looking for quick and easy stats they can use to run their business, like what content is popular, what referrals are driving traffic. And, if they're a business, they are making money, and at least some can afford to pay for expenses like website analytics. Like all software, it's not for everyone in every situation, but it is for certain folks in certain situations.

Appreciate the note and thought here. I do disagree though, as it feels like the spirit of GDPR is to make into law the protection and privacy for regular people. Fathom does this to the best of our ability, and our code reflects our agreement with the spirit of the law.

Analytics is required for business and isn't going anywhere. The laws don't feel like they are trying to shut down analytics completely, they are just asking this type of software to do better. That's what I think we are doing with this—and there are no other analytics companies who come close to our level of obfuscation and non-tracking of personal data.

If the intent of the law is do better with privacy and data, we are doing it to the best of our abilities. It's not a skirting around the issue, we are agreeing with it in our code and logic for how our tracker works.

So it's not as easy as just pushing the update to the repo. We are still committed to open-source, but we also have a business to run and need to make a living here (we're two dudes who care about privacy, not a huge company with deep pockets) :)

The community version is getting a full update soon. We just have to focus on profit a bit (this keeps us in business and able to update the repo).

I can only speak to Fathom (since that's my product), but we have no personal data to sell if we sold our product. We collect nothing about website visitors other than a tick in the aggregate data. So if we sold our business, there's zero personal information from website visitors on any of our customers dashboards that could be used against them.

jarod lanier and ezra klein talk about this in a recent episode of klein's show: companies can become more durable and much more aligned with the needs of their customers if they get paid directly by those customers (instead of selling those customers and making money off a third party, like advertisers).

while i 100% agree with you that our demo (hi! i'm author 2/2 of this software) should just log you in without asking for credentials... we're 100% focused on the product right now, and being near the top of HN was a huge surprise to us as well.

we are working on ironing out the UX of our site (it's a single column of text, that we whipped together in an hour, so we could focus on building the software). so it's completely a work in progress at this particular moment.