Data policy

Lite Analytics provides web analytics services which analyses web traffic on your website by using a small portion of JavaScript code that you place on your site in order of Lite Analytics to work.

<script defer async data-host="example.com" src="https://liteanalytics.com/lite.js"></script>

When the code is installed on your site, each pageview from your site will trigger the code to send pageview data to our service.

User privacy and data we collect

Lite Analytics does not use cookies and you don’t have to put cookie consent popup on your site just for Lite Analyitics.

Rule of thumb in web analytics is that the more data you collect, the less privacy there is for website users, and vice versa, the more you respect user privacy, the less useful data you can collect.

Lite Analytics tries to find balanced solution which will respect the website users privacy, but also be able to collect enough data to provide useful reports to website owners so they can improve their websites.

Lite Analytics collects only the necessary data for web analytics respecting the privacy of your site’s users.

How do we use this data to identify the session?

The pageview request sent to our service will contain all the data we need to identify page view and daily visitors. Some data is collected by our script, like user screen resolution, but most of the data is provided as standard data exchanged between browser and web server like User agent string which identifies your browser and IP address.

When we receive the data, we use hash function to anonymize the data. Hash functions are mathematical functions that transform a given set of data into a bit string of fixed size, also known as the "hash value". When using secure hashing functions it is extremly difficult, if not impossible, to revers engineer the hash value to get the input params.

By using hash function we build short-term anonymized and untraceable hash value which identifies the user for the current day by using this input parameters:

hash(date + hostname + ip + user agent data + salt)

Hash value will look something like this: fTaASyBn1MKXNM0Sn8VRP/FA1To

After hashing, the IP address is discarded, and it is not saved in our database.

Why we picked these parameters to make user hash value?

By providing date in website time zone to hash function, we make sure that user can’t be tracked over the period longer than current day. That is why our analytics can’t provide absolute unique visitors over month etc. like some cookie-based analytics. Same user will get the new hash on each day.

By providing hostname to hash function we make sure that the user can’t be cross tracked over multiple sites. Same user will get another hash for each site he visits which use Lite Analytics.

By providinf IP and user agent data to hash function we identify the user network and device. We can’t track the user over devices (desktop, mobile) since the same user will get different hash on each device. Also changing network will produce different hash.

We add a little bit of salt to spice up security of our hash.

What do we collect?

In following table you can see what data do we collect. We also explaind from where this data are derived and why we think that this data should be included in analytics reports.

Data storage

All our services and collected data are hosted with EU based company Hetzner and their servers in Germany.