Hello there! It’s been way too long!

As the May 25 deadline for GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) approaches, we’ve been getting a lot of questions about it. So without further ado:

Yes, Clicky will be GDPR compliant. In fact we can’t wait. I mean, what company isn’t jumping for joy at the prospect of crippling their own service to be compliant with a law made on another continent by politicians who have no idea how the internet works?

…Is this thing on?

Some features will have to be drastically changed or removed entirely, because it is now illegal anywhere in the world to log personally identifiable information (PII) of a European person without either consent or an extremely valid reason (e.g. logging a customer’s address when taking their billing info). For example, we’ve offered the option to anonymize logged IP addresses for many years, but anonymized IPs are the future for all of you now.

A big reason we charge money is so that we don’t have to sell your data to make money. If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product. The only person who has access to a site’s data on Clicky is the account owner. There’s no cross referencing of visitors between sites, we don’t build profiles of people for all the sites they visit and then sell it to advertisers like Facebook does. We could, but that’s the kind of shit that free services pull, and we’re not free. I would feel dirty anyways if we sold your data. The data is just… there… for site owner’s to analyze. And that’s it. Seriously!

Does GDPR care? LUL Have you not been paying attention. If I gave you a nickel for every ounce that GDPR cared about legit services like Clicky, you would actually be poorer.

Think about the huge Facebook data leak that just happened and how fucking irresponsible Facebook was to let companies intentionally access that kind of data on their users in the first place. In terms of privacy violations, that’s about as bad as it gets and that is the kind of thing that needs to be stopped. We just want to provide you with traffic reports for your site, but we’re being grouped together with the likes of Facebook, who I now consider one of the most evil internet companies around. Cool.

Here is a partial list of the changes probably coming soon to a Clicky near you:

  • Viewing data on our site may require full user authentication (no more private links or “public access”).
  • IP address anonymization might be forced rather than optional for all accounts.
  • Third party tracking cookies may be disabled. These are to help track the same visitor across multiple domains in your own account but this may be an issue now.
  • “Do Not Track” headers will be honored.
  • Public opt-out page for people to opt out of being tracked by all sites running Clicky.
  • Widgets that display individual visitor info will be changed/removed.
  • Custom data tracking – since this allows you to attach any data you want to visitor sessions, some of which may be PII (such as emails or usernames), something will need to change. Perhaps you’ll need to check a box to assume full responsibility for any PII you choose to log before custom logging will work for your account.
  • Tools for you to comply with GDPR requests from your visitors (data you have about them, ability to delete it, etc).
  • Clicky will be Privacy Shield certified.
  • … and so much more! Subscribe today!

This is a partial list. We’ll have more details within a few weeks as work continues on this.

I’m sorry I couldn’t keep the snark out of this post, but rest assured we are taking the law very seriously as we know the future of Clicky depends on it. This is top priority and the only thing we’re working on until it’s done.

1 COMMENT

  1. The public opt out page is what worries me. When my visitors see “Do you want to allow this website to gather your personal information for tracking purposes” I’m assuming a large percentage of them will click no, therefore I will have rather skewed image of how many actual visitors my website is getting. Am I wrong to assume this?

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