Site updates

Time for another site update. This month, several updates have been pushed to the site. Most of them have to do with data collection and privacy. So what's been happening? There's one thing that's been on SFMLab for a long time. It is a Google Analytics script, that's been silently gathering your data while you browse the site. The reasons for using Google Analytics are fairly simple: - It was a tool I was familiar with - It was free - It showed me the data I wanted to see (mainly page views and page speed) However, I have always had my concerns about online privacy. It is a very invasive tool, and while I use it on SFMLab to get insight into site usage, I always block Analytics myself, because I know what Google can actually do with that data. There were plenty of other ways to get the data I wanted without actually letting a third party like Google gather more data than necessary. I chose convenience over SFMLab's users, while not being affected myself. With the recent Facebook and Twitter scandals regarding data collection, I've taken the time to reflect on what kind of data SFMLab gathers and how and why. This lead me to start working on the removal of Google Analytics. But not without a proper replacement. The main reason to gather statistics is to measure success. How do you measure SFMLab's succes? The number of visitors, uploads, downloads and comments. If those amounts grow over time, the site is successful. How much of that is Google Analytics giving me and how accurate is it? Actually not that accurate, because anyone with an adblocker blocks it! And when it does give Mr data, it can only give me hits or sessions. Google is actually a really bad tool for me to gather those stats and in the meantime, they are spying on all of SFMLabs users. And the irony here is, I already have all the useful data: I just don't store a record of these values over time. This weekend I made good progress towards pushing metrics from the site database, to a special database server (influxdb) that I manage myself. From there, I take these values and put them into grafana, which is a tool that makes it easy to build dashboards for data visualization. I have some pretty cool graphs that I would like to show in a later post. I'm going to be gathering data through this new setup for the next few weeks and see how it stacks up to Analytics, but the first results are enough for me to promise that Google Analytics will be removed from the site pretty soon. Next, I'd like to mention that I've added account deletion to the site. This is in part because of the GDPR going into effect pretty soon. The GDPR is a new data protection law that's been introduced by the EU. It will give users more control over their data, whilst limiting the kinds of data that companies can gather. While the risk of SFMLab being audited for GDPR compliance is really fucking low, I'd like to at least make an effort towards becoming somewhat compliant. People have asked me in the past, through email, to delete their account. This made nobody happy, and I didn't want to spend time on building something like that, so it never happened. But now it has. There may be a bug where some older accounts get an error when deleting, but this does not take away the fact that their accounts are removed. Please report issues through discord or email and I'll look into it. Lastly, the NYC server was retired last week. The SFMLab download library has grown to the point where the money for the NYC server had to be allocated towards increasing the disk space of the SF server. For now, the NYC server will not return, unless great demand pushes the patreon to new heights. Look forward to seeing more updates later this week.