This article will explain the primary mission and purpose of Burst Statistics: To follow best practices for your users’ privacy while still being able to have meaningful data to improve your business or personal blog.
What is Privacy-Friendly?
Privacy-Friendly does not mean it’s always permitted before consent. Depending on your region and guidelines, Burst Statistics might need consent.
In Germany, for the DSGVO, Burst Statistics can be set before consent because it meets the requirements of anonymization, minimization and hosting the data locally, instead of a third-party, e.g., Google Analytics, for example.
In the Netherlands, explicit consent for statistics is not required if the stored data is anonymized.
The United Kingdom: The Statistical Purposes Exception
In the United Kingdom, the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations (PECR) include a ‘statistical purposes‘ exception that removes the requirement for consent under specific conditions. Analytics tools do not require consent if the data is used solely for statistical purposes, is not shared with third parties, and does not identify individual users. Burst Statistics meets all of these conditions: data is stored locally on your own server, IP addresses are anonymized, and no personal data is shared with third parties. This is in contrast to tools like Google Analytics, which the ICO has explicitly stated do not qualify for this exception because data is processed by and shared with a third party. As a self-hosted, anonymized analytics solution, Burst Statistics falls within the exception, meaning UK website owners can use Burst without a cookie consent banner for their analytics, while still being transparent about data collection in their privacy policy.
Generally speaking, in a lot of EU countries you don’t need consent for statistics if it is self hosted, and anonymized, as Burst does.
Privacy-Friendly for Burst Statistics is minimizing data, anonymization, and keeping data locally, while being flexibile with Consent Management integrations.
A misunderstanding about Cookies
Burst does offer a cookieless option but cookies are not the issue, per se. Cookies are controllable and easily removed by the end-user. They can be removed by third-party browser extensions and make the web user-friendly. But some cookies contain personal data and relationships between your device and you as a user and can be stored on your device without consent.
Some cookies do not require consent. These cookies do not interfere with the user’s privacy in any way, or the user’s privacy is overruled by the function of a cookie. These cookies are rare and solely used to protect the user against fraud and theft, for example, a cookie from a payment provider. There’s an alternative approach, but is it any good?
A misunderstanding about Cookieless Tracking
Of course, why even bother with a discussion about cookies if you can remove them altogether? Besides the technical implementations and implications, there are two reasons to consider using cookies in the future:
- Privacy Laws are not about cookies. Cookies are just a medium for collecting data and tracking. In Europe, cookies are referenced in the ePrivacy guideline, but the “General” Data Protection Regulation has a much more comprehensive range regarding data collection and sharing. “Cookieless Tracking” still has “Tracking” to worry about.
- As mentioned earlier, cookies are easier to control, remove and understand by the public. If all tracking is pushed towards server-side API calls, the end-user has no say in collecting and sharing their data if the website operator does not comply with the privacy law.
If a website doesn’t not ask consent for cookies. You can always remove the cookies. If the website does not ask consent for cookieless tracking, there’s no way for you to remove the stored data.
Developed by Burst Statistics
Burst Statistics is designed to meet the needs of everyone dealing with privacy guidelines while working with third parties to collect statistics, e.g. Google Analytics, Matomo Cloud, Yandex, Clicky etc. We want to offer a statistics tool that is built for privacy and ease of use for everyone. Burst offers the essential metrics that are owned by you. Burst Statistics is not a processor or third-party.
The aim is to collaborate with our users to build the best alternative for your current statistics tool without worrying about privacy or complicated integrations with native WordPress plugins like WooCommerce.
