Iām going on the journey of building a simple, private, self-hosted, cookie-free analytics tool that Iām calling Kownter. I may fail. But it will be fun and interesting! Come along!
Hi, My name isĀ Ross.Ā Iāve been thinking a lot aboutĀ GDPRĀ lately and considering how I will become compliant with it as I run my business and projects, so Iām looking to slim down the data that I capture about people.
The topics of both analytics and server logs have come up several times. Itās not entirely clear to me that either fall into the category of personal data, but Iāve been considering my use of them anyway.
I use Google Analytics on most sites/projects that I create, but Iām not that sophisticated in my use of it. Iām mostly interested in:
and it occurred to me that I can collect this data without using cookies and without collecting anything that would personally identify someone.
- how many visitors Iām getting and when
- which pages are popular
- where people are coming from
I would also be happier if my analytics were stored on a server in the EU rather than in the US ā I canāt find any guarantee that my Google Analytics data is and remains EU-based.
Iām 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. Iāve 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?