👓 About Kownter | Kownter

Read About Kownter (blog.kownter.com)

Iā€™m going on the journey of building a simple, private, self-hosted, cookie-free analytics tool that Iā€™m calling Kownter. I may fail. But it will be fun and interesting! Come along!

Hi, My name isĀ Ross.Ā  Iā€™ve been thinking a lot aboutĀ GDPRĀ lately and considering how I will become compliant with it as I run my business and projects, so Iā€™m looking to slim down the data that I capture about people.

The topics of both analytics and server logs have come up several times. Itā€™s not entirely clear to me that either fall into the category of personal data, but Iā€™ve been considering my use of them anyway.

I use Google Analytics on most sites/projects that I create, but Iā€™m not that sophisticated in my use of it. Iā€™m mostly interested in:

  • how many visitors Iā€™m getting and when
  • which pages are popular
  • where people are coming from
and it occurred to me that I can collect this data without using cookies and without collecting anything that would personally identify someone.

I would also be happier if my analytics were stored on a server in the EU rather than in the US ā€“ I canā€™t find any guarantee that my Google Analytics data is and remains EU-based.

Iā€™m aware that there are self-hosted, open-source analytics solutions likeĀ MatomoĀ (previously Piwik) andĀ Open Web Analytics. But they always seem very large and clunky. Iā€™ve tried them and never got to grips with them.

So I wondered: how hard would it be to build my own, simple, high-privacy, cookie-free analytics tool?

Published by

Chris Aldrich

I'm a biomedical and electrical engineer with interests in information theory, complexity, evolution, genetics, signal processing, IndieWeb, theoretical mathematics, and big history. I'm also a talent manager-producer-publisher in the entertainment industry with expertise in representation, distribution, finance, production, content delivery, and new media.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *