The number of privacy-focused analytics tools is ever-growing. And the perfect balance between freshness and promoted evilness of legacy tools is appealing.
Rightfully, all of them try to mitigate identity to promote privacy. And while it makes sense, at first sight, questions arise around the usefulness of the resulting statistics.
What is a visitor in a privacy-focused analytics tool? Can we have a returning visitor when it is not tied to identity over time and across visits? How can we even interpret these numbers?
Let's summarize the ladder of identity on the web:
Logged in user > Persistent identity (e.g. cookie) > Ephemeral identity (e.g. 24h hash) > no identity.
Privacy-focused tools seem to provide the last ones while promoting the same advantage as the first ones! Coolness over effectiveness?
What's all the fuss really about?
It's worth noting that the question is not about all the different kinds of statistics these tools can provide without relying on a cookie but about the legitimacy and the relevance of the visitors' related statistics (e.g., new, returning, etc.).
What is a visitor in a privacy-focused analytics tool? Can we have a returning visitor when it is not tied to identity over time and across visits? How can we even interpret these numbers?
Let's summarize the ladder of identity on the web: Logged in user > Persistent identity (e.g. cookie) > Ephemeral identity (e.g. 24h hash) > no identity.
Privacy-focused tools seem to provide the last ones while promoting the same advantage as the first ones! Coolness over effectiveness?
What's all the fuss really about?
It's worth noting that the question is not about all the different kinds of statistics these tools can provide without relying on a cookie but about the legitimacy and the relevance of the visitors' related statistics (e.g., new, returning, etc.).