You might not know it, but when you browse the internet, there are corporate giants like Facebook and Google who spy on your activity in order to make money. Every time you use any of their services, they are collecting data about you and building a unique profile about you which they can use to show you ads. You might be wondering how they accomplish this. They do so by placing third-party cookies on your browser which helps them identity who you are and track your activity.

What is a cookie?

A cookie is a piece of data that is attached to all requests you make to a website. The primary usage is to help the website identify who you are, so they can provide you the right services. For instance, when you log into a website, the website places a cookie on your browser so that they can tell that you are logged in and give you access to your account. This is what is referred to as a first-party cookie, since it comes from the original website. However, there are also third-party cookies, which are injected by services a website is using, such as Google Analytics.

Cookie abuse

Many websites today use Google Analytics to measure their traffic. In order to get that functionality, website owners must place a piece of code on their website which points back to Google’s servers. This code also has the ability to place cookies on visitors’ browsers. Google takes advantage of this by harvesting data about all your visitors, invading their privacy. It’s like having a backdoor on your website that Google can use freely to collect data.

Google’s third-party cookies are used to track you around the internet. For instance, when you visit website A, which is using Google Analytics, then visit website B, which is also using Google Analytics, Google can then connect the dots to know all the sites that you visit. From that information, they can learn what things you are interested in order to sell ads.

What is GDPR?

Due rampant abuse by companies invading users’ privacy, the EU enacted a law called GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) to protect the privacy of their citizens. Basically, the GDPR forbids companies from collecting personal information from their users without the user’s consent. It attempts to reign the control of data back from companies and into the hands of users.

As a consequence of this, there has been a proliferation of “cookie banners” which are annoying notifications that appear on websites trying to get to consent to being tracked. However, these banners don’t solve the issue of privacy abuse to begin with. They are only meant to get quick consent so that the company can continue to track you.

What’s the solution?

If you care about the privacy of your users, then you need to adopt a privacy-focused analytics solution like Umami. Umami does not violate the privacy of your users because it does not use cookies, does not collect any personal information from your users, and does not track users across websites. All the data collected is unique to each installation, so even if Umami is installed on multiple websites, it’s impossible to share data between sites to track users.

Umami is not in the advertising business and will never sell your data to a third-party. Therefore, Umami has no interest in collecting personal data from users. Umami’s goal is to give you the best insights into your web traffic using only privacy-friendly methods.