Show HN: Consentless – A minimalist, privacy-preserving traffic counter
consentless.joeldare.comSeveral years ago I started tracking my own website stats using a minimal counter that preserves user privacy. I wrote about that in my article, Private Analytics and the Raspberry Pi in my Bedroom.
The original version was a PHP script. It's been working well for several years, but I had some hardware trouble with the Raspberry Pi. So, this week I took those concepts and wrote Consentless as a Go application to replace that original script and I created some initial documentation.
Looks pretty neat, does it have any unique selling point compared to existing like GoatCounter? Are you intending on adding some CLI integration for visualizing the CSV on the fly? Thanks :)
Most of the solutions I've seen, even ones that say they have privacy, store things that can be used to fingerprint a user. I wanted my solution to be extreme in that it would not store anything that could possibly be accused of having an ability to fingerprinting or track a "user".
The result is that you only get impression data and there are a lot of things you can't know about your traffic.
Many of the other solutions say they don't require consent but I think there is a lot of untested ambiguity here. Many of the tools store and display information like "OS", "Location", "Screen Size", and the like. These values, when combined, can be used as a "fingerprint" to identify a user.
I wanted the data in my solution to be so narrowly focused that not even a public log could be used to correlate data and narrow in on a specific user.
I hadn't considered a CLI to the results but I like that idea.