Privacy

Short version: I count visits. I can't follow anybody around the internet, and neither can you. Here's the long version, including the bits that aren't flattering.

The short list of what happens

No cookies. No cross-site tracking. Nothing gets stored on or read from your visitors' devices, and nothing is sold, shared, or handed off to an ad network. Not "we don't currently" — there is no mechanism for it here.

Where it all ends up

To me. "First-party" gets used to imply otherwise, so it's worth saying plainly.

Your visitors' browsers only ever talk to your domain. That's what first-party means here: no third-party request, nothing for a blocker to catch, no extra connection. But your proxy then passes that event along to TellWright, and it ends up on my servers. This is a service, not a library that keeps everything at home.

So yes, I do see the visitor's IP address — for exactly as long as it takes to hash it. Then it's gone. Never written down, never stored, never joined up with anybody else's numbers.

Now for the asterisk

When I say anonymous, I mean the visitors who never sign in to your app. The ones who do sign in get handled differently, and you should know how.

When somebody signs in, your backend tells me so, and that person gets an identifier that stays the same for as long as they exist. It has to work that way, because you can't tell whether people are coming back if you can't tell it's the same person in March that it was in February. So no, those visitors are not anonymous to you.

What I don't keep is their actual account. Their ID from your login provider is hashed on arrival, with a secret only I hold, and the original is thrown away. So what's in my database is a long meaningless string that's consistent over time and points at nobody in particular.

So how does the identifier work?

For everyone else — the visitors who never sign in — it's a hash of the day's secret, the visitor's IP, their browser, and your site. Worked out on my side the instant the event arrives. The secret rotates every 24 hours and is never kept. The raw IP survives for the length of that one calculation and is never written down.

One thing from the browser does get kept: a coarse label. Desktop, phone or tablet; which browser family; its major version. Enough to tell you how many of your visitors are on a phone, nowhere near enough to pick one of them out of a crowd. The browser's own identifying string, which those labels get worked out from, doesn't get written down either.

That's also why I can't tell you whether an anonymous visitor came back last week. Once the day's secret is destroyed, there's nothing left to connect yesterday's identifier to today's.

TellWright — analytics for small projects. It works; it's just not open yet.

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