My web hosting provider gives me access to some old-school tools, like AWStats, for seeing activity on the site, but I was looking for something different. The free analytics tools are of course a privacy nightmare, so I knew I wouldn’t use them. The more privacy-friendly options tend to require self-hosting or paying a rather high monthly fee for something that’s really just a hobby.
Enter GoatCounter. The developer has the right idea about counting visits and page views rather than trying to do some deep analysis on visitor behavior. So, it’s probably not suited for a commercial site, but it gets me some basic information about performance without sacrificing visitor privacy.
Here’s a good chunk of the privacy policy (emphasis mine):
The following information can be collected:
- URL of the visited page.
- Referer header.
- User-Agent header.
- Screen size.
- Country name based on IP address.
- A hash of the IP address, User-Agent, and random number.
There is a setting to disable collecting any of this data and the collected data may differ per hosted site, but the default is to collect all of the above.
No personal information (such as IP address) is collected; a hash of the IP address, User-Agent, and a random number (“salt”) is kept in the process memory for 8 hours at the most to identify a browsing session.
There is no information stored in the browser with cookies, localStorage, or other methods.
No information is shared with third parties.
The downside seems to be that adblockers may block the domain used to do the counting, but I’m OK with that; visitors should have a choice!