What Makes it Privacy-Friendly?

There are three ways that Independent Analytics addresses user privacy laws, such as the GDPR (DSGVO) and CCPA.

First, Independent Analytics does not communicate with external servers. Unlike third-party apps that save your data on their servers, Independent Analytics is a WordPress plugin that runs entirely on your site. Your analytics data is both created and stored on your server without anyone else ever having access.

Second, Independent Analytics does not store personal data. It uses a visitor’s IP address to get their geolocation, then hashes their IP with their User Agent and a salt token to create a unique ID, which gets saved to the database. This allows Independent Analytics to recognize the same visitor when they return without storing personal data. It’s important to note that this unique ID is created with a one-way hash, not using encryption, so there is no key to revert it to the original contents.

Here is an example of what a visitor ID looks like in the database: 0f267385cf696c7022d463f610a2c20c

Third and last, Independent Analytics does not use cookies at all.

Limiting how long visitors are recognized

By default, Independent Analytics will recognize repeat visitors for as long as it can. This is naturally limited due to visitors changing their browser, device, and/or IP address over time.

With that said, if you would like to set a hard limit on how long the same visitor can be recognized, there is a setting to change the salt refresh rate, allowing Independent Analytics to recognize visitors for no longer than 24 hours.

HIPAA compliance

Independent Analytics does not have access to or store protected health information (PHI). It also does not store any personal information that could be tied to an individual’s health records. Additionally, it does not communicate with external servers, preventing any disclosure of data to other tracking technologies or vendors.

If you have any further questions about how Independent Analytics handles data privacy, please feel free to get in touch via our contact page.