Just don't include facebook like buttons or any of these widgets
I have a basic Github Pages site, and I currently don't know whether anyone is looking at it, beyond the very few who take the time to email me. I don't need (or want) to know anything about my visitors, but it would be nice to know that I'm not simply tossing stuff into the ether.
and it wasn't even running on wordpress
you'll need a cookie banner then
These third parties will take what you give them and _also_ take what they can get from your browser if you're embedding their script. Are you going to proxy those scripts as well to stop them getting the user's IP address and then geolocating it to grab even more info?
The cookie warning banner is bullshit only in the sense that it achieves nothing. Accept it or deny it, it won't change a thing. Same with the tracking consent popups: despite the law saying they should be opt-in by default, they're still treated as opt-out by default, meaning that all of these sites _still_ collect your data because you're blacklisting individual sites from tracking, as opposed to whitelisting them. You need to set a cookie to say that you don't want tracking and not thousands of cookies to say you do want it?
That's being tracked... it's all wrong. Literally everything you offer as information, or don't offer, is another node in their graph.
WTF is that...
Completely at odds with the whole "informed consent" thing.
That seems to be the advice of the UK ICO: https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-pecr/cookies-a...
Analytics cookies are not strictly necessary.
Alternatively your pagecount will shoot to the millions if you have someone holding f5.
> I currently don't know whether anyone is looking at it
You don't need tracking cookies to track simple metrics like pageview numbers.
So yes, use of tracking cookies, first or third party, would require a Cookie Consent Banner.
Seems like a cool company/project to me.
But, it's not free :( $19/mo Still thought it's worth pointing out.
It is self-hosted but on firebase and taking advantage of the free tier. Of course there is no personal data collected at any point.
There are still improvement to do, but as it works perfectly for me I have not be able to gather enough motivation to do that.
Panelbear is privacy-friendly, and has a free plan with 5,000 page views per month. Commercial use is allowed.
Full-disclosure: I’m running this service. Feel free to ask me anything :)
Thank you for providing this service.
I see this... "We do not generate any persistent identifiers either. We generate a random string of letters and numbers that is used to calculate unique visitors on a website and we reset this string once per day."
But where is that ID stored?
The salt must be treated like a password to make sure it's not that easy to brute force it and no one should get access to your database of course ;) It's not the strongest anonymization, but good enough considering that the hits will be deleted once a day by batch processing.
> So if you don’t use cookies how do you count the number of website visitors and report on metrics such as the number of unique users?
> Instead of tagging users with cookies, we count the number of unique IP addresses that accessed your website. Counting IP addresses is an old-school method that was used before the modern age of JavaScript snippets and tracking cookies.
> Since IP addresses are considered personal data under GDPR, we anonymize them using a one-way cryptographic hash function. This generates a random string of letters and numbers that is used to calculate unique visitor numbers for the day. Old salts are deleted to avoid the possibility of linking visitor information from one day to the next. We never store IP addresses in our database or logs.
...
> In our testing, using IP addresses to count visitors is remarkably accurate when compared to using a cookie. Total unique visitor counts were within 10% error range with IP-based counting usually showing lower numbers.
From here: https://plausible.io/blog/google-analytics-cookies#can-you-g...
Mine gives one public ipv4 per device that access the internet on the network (with some exceptions). Strategies varies but if you have a lot of addresses why not use them.
I've only skimmed over the docs, but it looks like they derive a unique identifier from the IP address and user agent which changes every day. IP addresses still count as Personally Identifiable Information under GDPR, so deriving an identifier from this for a use case such as analytics would likely require consent. This is speculation though so I'd be interested to hear what others think.
If it is critical to the operation of the website (functionality like storing saved items in a shopping cart, or security), then you wouldn't need consent.
In reality though, Plausible looks great and using it is a huge improvement over Google Analytics for privacy.
I'm not an expert in this even though I'm a webdev from the EU, so I'm also interested in other people's input.
I don’t believe that one should automatically conclude that just because a cookie requires active consent, any kind of ‘logging’ (local and temporary storage of IPs in order to track website usage) requires active consent. Those are two fundamentally different things.
I’m not saying you should hide the fact that you’re doing it. I’m saying it should be stated in the privacy policy.
Also remember that there is a big difference between ‘personally identifiable information’ and ‘sensitive information’ which are clearly separated concepts in GDPR. Not all collection of data requires active consent.
I did read my EU state’s guideline on GDPR in full, but I’m not an expert. I would suggest reading up on the ePrivacy Directive though, which is still in effect.
However regardless of whether you're using cookies, I still think you need to collect explicit consent as GDPR requires a lawful basis of processing, and I don't see how analytics would fall under any of the other lawful basis's other than consent (_maybe_ legitimate interests?)
If you are using cookies, then my understanding is you need to collect consent where necessary under _both_ ePrivacy and GDPR.
Only if there is a bijection between the identifier and the IP address, so that you could re-derive the IP address from the identifier. Otherwise, I do not see how the identifier itself would count as PII.
This way of divorcing data from PII by replacing it with pseudonymous identifiers which cannot be linked back is a relatively standard technique for this.
The GDPR does not count anything as "Personally Identifiable Information", which isn't surprising as that's a US legal term.
What you mean is "Personal Data", and yes IP addresses are considered personal data under the GDPR.
>so deriving an identifier from this for a use case such as analytics would likely require consent.
Consent isn't the only legal basis for processing personal data, though, there are 5 others available.
(I had to do it here too.)
But note there are other reasons you can have for collecting data other than consent (something often overlooked) - for example I would guess GitHub would log IP addresses in the back end for a limited time for spam fighting reasons, and I think that would be fine.
I agree with you by the way, but ...
On my personal web sites I'm using GoAccess, which is basically a new spin on a very old idea -- just analyzing the server's web logs.
That's not as accurate as throwing around cookies and JavaScript, but I rarely check the log pages anyway, and when I do I'm less interested in raw numbers than I am in the relative performance of various pages. (And that's mostly just idle curiosity, e.g., are there some old articles that keep getting steady traffic from somewhere?)