Privacy-First Web Telemetry Architecture
A comprehensive technical specification of how Open Analytics measures web performance, user journeys, and errors without storing IP addresses, dropping cookies, or enabling cross-site tracking.
The Five Technical Pillars
Engineered from the ground up to minimize personal data processing.
1. Ephemeral Daily Cryptographic Salts
Visitor hashes are computed using HMAC-SHA-256 combining the client IP, User-Agent, and a randomly generated cryptographic salt. This salt rotates automatically every 24 hours at 00:00:00 UTC and is permanently destroyed from memory.
2. Memory-Only IP Anonymization
Incoming request IP addresses are held exclusively in volatile RAM only long enough to extract coarse geographic metadata (country and city) and compute the 24-hour hash. Raw IP addresses are never written to database disk storage or log files.
3. Automated PII URL Redaction
Our edge ingestion pipeline automatically sanitizes URLs, discarding sensitive parameters like email addresses, auth tokens, session IDs, and credit card numbers before analytics events are recorded.
4. Hard Automated Data Retention
Raw telemetry collections have a MongoDB TTL index capped at exactly 365 days. Data older than the retention threshold is automatically evicted by the database engine, adhering strictly to data minimization requirements.
Regulatory Alignment Overview
How our architecture aligns with international data protection frameworks.
EU GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation)
By discarding personal identifiers and avoiding device fingerprinting, Open Analytics can be deployed under Legitimate Interest (Article 6(1)(f)) for standard web analytics, without requiring active cookie consent banners.
EU ePrivacy Directive & UK PECR
The ePrivacy Directive governs information stored on or accessed from terminal equipment (cookies, localStorage). Because Open Analytics executes statelessly without reading or writing to terminal storage, it is exempt from consent popup requirements.
California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA / CPRA)
Open Analytics does not sell, share, or broker personal information. We do not maintain cross-site behavioral profiles, eliminating the need for “Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information” links.
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Open Analytics gives you enterprise analytics and observability with total privacy respect.