Show HN: Freshlytics – Self-hosted analytics that respects user privacy
github.com
github.com
Freshlytics is a self-hosted open-source privacy-friendly analytics software.
You can use it to learn more about your users in terms of visited urls, referrers and browsers used without invading the users privacy.
It doesn't use cookies and doesn't collect PII. It doesn't even store event level data - only aggregate data for the whole day organised by different dimensions. That is, after an event is ingested by the system it's grouped with all other events sent by other visitors - so you can't view the events just for a visitor or a visitor's browser etc. While this limits what metrics can be collected, I felt that there might be a good portion of websites on the internet who don't need these invasive metrics.
It's built using Typescript (React/Express) and uses PipelineDB for storage. All the reports are pre-defined (not adhoc) so I felt this is a good use case for PipelineDB's continuous views.
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Screenshots: https://github.com/sheshbabu/freshlytics/blob/master/docs/sc...
Docs: https://freshlytics.gitbook.io/docs/
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Features:
Privacy
* Cookies are not used
* Personally identifiable information (PII) is not collected
Dashboard
* Switch between multiple projects
* Slice the data within a date range
* See the pageview in different dimensions like page urls, referrers, browsers etc
Tracking
* Currently focuses on website pageview tracking
* Tracks visited page urls, referrers, browsers and browser versions
Projects
* Supports multiple projects
* Different projects can have different reporting timezones
Users
* Users can either be Admin or normal users
* Admins can create/edit/delete projects and other users
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Please give it a try and let me know what you would like to see improved :)
A form of tracking is required to make collected data _actionable_. You'd normally want to know that people coming from this referrer bounce, but those coming from another source - stay, look around, subscribe/download/buy, etc. Being able to tell newcomers from returning visitors is also very useful.
More generally speaking, I strongly suspect that very few people will object to being tracked by the website as they traverse its own pages. Ditto for receiving a cookie to facilitate the process. It's the cross-site 3rd party tracking that's an issue. In other words, restricting self-hosted analytics package to NOT use cookies solves a problem that doesn't exist and it's a rather pointless thing to do.