Goatcounter - Privacy-friendly web analytics

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I came across a blog post on how to develop a privacy-friendly web analytics platform. It’s inspired by Goatcounter, which claims it doesn’t need a GDPR consent notice because it doesn’t use unique identifiers.

It’s open source and can be self-hosted, but it is also available for free, for non-commercial uses, at goatcounter.com.

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Thanks for bringing this up. I’ve also heard about Matomo (previously called Piwik).

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I have used Piwik before, and I still have a site using Matomo, with the strictest settings (for instance, using only the first two bytes of the IP address) but it does still need a GDPR notice.

It should be noted that the goatcounter page says it probably doesn’t need a GDPR notice, and they caution users about it (if in doubt, get legal advice).

Also, the method in the blog post I linked to strips most information from the User-Agent (goatcounter uses the full header, according to their GDPR page), making it harder to identify users.

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Ah. I see. Our webiste also pseudonymises IP addresses. I don’t recall the precision, though but it should be somewhere on our code.

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Wow, that’s amazing. Not the web analytics part, I didn’t find it, I mean the whole repository. You have your own mail and chat servers, etc, all easily deployed. A bit off-topic for this thread, but it reminds me of Freedom Box and similar projects, with which you can have your own node on the Internet. Of course, then you have the burden of managing the services. I never had the courage to run my own mail server, I’d be afraid to slip up on security or reliability. To get back on topic, I guess that is why most people use Google Analytics.

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Happy to hear :). Kudos also to @vasilis who has contributed the most to it. We’ve put quite a significant effort into managing all our infrastructure.

Quite similar indeed. At least one other member on this forum has a freedom box (as far as I’m aware). Ideally these things would be just plug-and-play, but in reality, they are not :frowning:

Exactly. In a world where website owners don’t even consider the privacy of their users google analytics is probably the simplest, cheapest (for them!) solution…

And that’s why 80% of websites have google trackers… Sad world :cry:

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I can’t help but notice that goad counter is an excellent name. Maybe sheep counting would have been even better

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Here is the relevant IP mask used on the of privacylx.org:

Also, we do not keep/save logs in files:

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