Internet infrastructure giant Cloudflare has unveiled a new privacy-focused website analytics platform designed to challenge the dominance of Google Analytics (GA). Like GA, Cloudflare Web Analytics will extract information about visitors to a given website: their volume, time spent on the page, geographic location, device type, etc. - that the user can navigate through a centralized panel. Where the two services diverge, however, is that Cloudflare won't store or leverage the types of user data that Google uses to score and boost online ads, a practice some see as a privacy violation. Cloudflare Web Analytics was immediately made available to existing customers and will be released free of charge for all website administrators to use in the near future.
Alternative to Google Analytics
According to Cloudflare, the web privacy debate has reached its peak this year, and as a result, users are becoming increasingly reluctant to tolerate the kinds of data collection practices carried out by the world's tech giants. Google and Facebook, for example, have set out to provoke and qualify the complexities of each individual who interacts with any of their platforms, which are almost impossible to avoid. “This year it is palpable how privacy and data concerns are becoming one of the real touchstones that set various technology companies apart,” said Matthew Prince, CEO of Cloudflare. “There are some good things about the ad-supported model, it's a fair way to make content accessible to everyone, but there's no doubt there has been a level of abuse on the security front, in Internet performance before. , but mostly on a scary, "I don't want Google and Facebook to know everything about me" front. " With Cloudflare Web Analytics, the CDN provider aims to buck this trend and strengthen its reputation as a champion of Internet privacy. On a related note, the company has launched a free website encryption tool, a DNS service focused on privacy and has introduced unlimited DDoS protection for customers of all sizes over the past few years.With this selection of tools (and now web analytics as well), Cloudflare hopes that businesses can provide their customers with the level of data security and privacy they demand now.