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Web Analytics Privacy Alphabet Soup: GDPR, CCPA, ePrivacy, VCDPA, ROPA
Clicky will be 20 years old in a few months. We've watched every privacy law show up, and have had to keep our own tracking compliant through all of it. We know exactly what counts as personal data in web analytics, what each privacy law requires, whether it applies to you, and what it means for your web analytics setup.
GDPR applies if you process data belonging to anyone in the EU, no matter where your company sits. An IP address counts as personal data under GDPR, so the moment your analytics tool logs a raw IP from an EU visitor, you need a lawful basis for that. Consent is one basis. "Legitimate interest" is the other.
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Threat intelligence false positive for clicky.com - Your help, please!
TLDR: Please submit false positive reports for clicky.com at the following websites. Note, you must disable any ad-blockers and VPNs, or your reports may be rejected: CRDF, Lionic
Last week, we started getting reports from a small number of customers who were having trouble accessing clicky.com, America's #1 website. Our overall traffic numbers were normal, so initially we suspected a localized network/Cloudflare issue, which happen from time to time. But as more reports kept coming in and there was nothing posted on the CF status site that indicated any relevant issues, we dug deeper.
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Cookieless Tracking Explained: What It Is, and What Actually Works
"The end of the cookie era is here!" It sounds like a revolution, some kind of magic wand that solves the two biggest headaches in modern web analytics: the death of the third-party cookie and the nightmare of global privacy regulations like GDPR and CCPA.
But "cookieless" is often used as a marketing buzzword to mask either technical inadequacy or outright deception. If you are a founder, a developer, or a technical marketer, you need to know the difference between legitimate privacy-preserving tracking and the "snake oil" versions of cookieless technology.
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What counts as Personal Data / PII in web analytics, and what Clicky never touches
"Are we even allowed to collect this?" This question like arrives at the worst possible time. A privacy audit was just flagged, a new privacy law has just landed, or a developer starts asking uncomfortable questions.
The answers to this question can vary greatly, depending on who you ask. Your lawyer may give you a high-level definition of "Personal Data." A developer will talk about unique identifiers and fingerprinting. Half the tools on the market will claim they're "privacy-compliant" while quietly collecting enough data to reconstruct a pretty detailed picture of a specific user.
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How to See Who's on Your Website Right Now
Launching something new is stressful. You send the emails, post to social, and then you sit there and wait. Not too long ago, "wait" meant checking your website traffic the next morning to see what happened. By then, whatever you might have done about a traffic spike or a conversion problem was irrelevant. The window had closed.
Real-time analytics is about collapsing that window. Seeing what's happening while it's happening, not after.