The Right to Be Left Alone
In 1890, Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis argued that the law must recognize a distinct right to privacy. They believed that technology should never be allowed to strip away our "inviolate personality." Today, the internet has forgotten this.
In a bakery, the baker counts the sale, but they don't pin a GPS tracker to your collar to see where you go next. The internet broke this default. We are fixing it. We count the visit, not the person.
What "Privacy-First" Actually Means
Privacy is not a legal checklist. It is the moral space individuals need to think, choose, and become themselves.
For us, being privacy-first means we minimize data by default, regardless of what the law technically allows. It is a proactive, values-driven approach that treats privacy as a product virtue. We ask: "How can we give users value without collecting sensitive data?"
The Hierarchy of Privacy
"We build insight on a foundation of ephemerality."
Here is exactly what happens when a visitor loads your page.
1. The Visit (Not the Visitor)
2. The 24-Hour Firewall
3. The Daily Reset
4. Aggregated & Safe
The same visitor, re-hashed when the date input changes at 00:00 UTC. Advance a day to watch the ID change while the count keeps rising.
The Privacy Trade-Off
We killed the cookie. We must be honest about what that costs, and what it gains.
The Cost: Multi-Touch Attribution
Because we do not track users across days, we cannot tell you that someone clicked an ad on Monday and bought a product on Friday.
That said, you still get attribution within each session: UTM campaign parameters, referrer sources, and full same-session journey tracking all work out of the box.
Multi-touch attribution is increasingly unreliable anyway. Users switch devices, clear cookies, and use multiple browsers. We chose to give you accurate same-session data rather than a cross-day model built on shaky foundations.
The Gain: Your Missing Visitors
Most customers run VeritaMetrics without a consent banner, so a visitor lands on your content rather than on a popup. Whether your site can do the same depends on your jurisdiction and on what else runs on the page. Our position, and the three things that cut against it, are set out under Compliance by Design below.
* Consent opt-in rates vary by region and industry. EU opt-in rates average 40-50% according to Cookiebot and Usercentrics research. Ad blocker adoption figures from PageFair / Blockthrough reports.
Keep the visitors a consent banner would have cost you
Start free and watch visits appear in real time with no cookie and no consent popup, or see everything the dashboard tracks.
What a visit records
Your address is cut to its first three blocks, then hashed with the date into a visit ID. That is how a visit gets counted without a cookie. That same block, and only that block, is what we send to an outside service to name the network you are on; the answer is cached under it for 24 hours. Neither version is written to a pageview or an event.
Whether your site still needs a consent banner depends on your jurisdiction and on what else you run, and it turns on ePrivacy Article 5(3) and PECR rather than on cookies alone. We set out our position, and what it depends on, below. It is not legal advice.
The company answerable for that position is Chelsea AI Ventures Ltd. Read our privacy policy or run it on your own servers.
Compliance by Design
We operate on a simple legal distinction: The Store vs. The Home.
- Legitimate Interest: A shopkeeper has a right to know how many people entered the store. This is our Visit ID.
- Explicit Consent: A shopkeeper needs permission to follow customers home. This is the Persistent Cookie.
We stick to the store.
This analogy covers the GDPR lawful basis. Whether a banner is required is a separate question under ePrivacy Art. 5(3), which Legitimate Interest does not answer.
GDPR Analysis
Article 6(1)(f): Processing is necessary for the purposes of the legitimate interests pursued by the controller.
Balancing Test: Does this override user rights?
No. Because the data is ephemeral (24h expiry),
salted, and cannot be used for cross-site tracking.
Do you need a consent banner? The honest answer
Most customers run VeritaMetrics without one. We have not found an enforcement action anywhere against a website operator for using a cookieless analytics tool without a banner. Published decisions are an incomplete record, so read that as "we did not find one" rather than "none exists".
What cuts the other way. ePrivacy Art. 5(3), and PECR in the UK, covers storing or
accessing information on a device whether or not that information is personal data, so
setting no cookies does not settle the question. The EDPB reads the rule as reaching an IP
address unless you can show it did not come from the visitor's device (Guidelines 2/2023
v2.0, paragraph 55). Our script writes three keys to sessionStorage, cleared
by the browser when the tab closes. And we collect UTM parameters by default, which the
French audience-measurement carve-out requires you to switch off.
This is our reading of the law, and it is not legal advice. The answer depends on your jurisdiction and on the rest of your site. Confirm it with your own legal adviser before you rely on it. The full version, with sources, is in our Privacy Policy.
What We Never Collect
The list below is what the product refuses to collect, by design.
Your Privacy Policy
Using VeritaMetrics simplifies your compliance. Here is a sample snippet you can include in your own privacy policy.
Analytics:
We use VeritaMetrics to collect anonymous usage data. It does not use cookies or store IP addresses.
Data is aggregated and processed in the EU, apart from a network lookup that receives the block
your address sits in (never the whole address) to name your network operator.
Data collected:
- Page Context: The specific URL visited and the Page Title.
- Traffic Source (Referrer): The URL of the page the user was on immediately before clicking a link to your site. We use this for attribution, but we do not have access to history prior to that link.
- Device Context: Browser type, Operating System, and Device type (e.g., Mobile vs Desktop).
- Approximate Location: Country, Region, and City derived from the IP address, which is not written to the row. Naming the network operator behind a visit needs an outside lookup, and what we send it is the network block the address sits in, never the whole address. The answer is cached under that block for 24 hours.
- Ephemeral Visit ID: A salted SHA-256 hash that takes the UTC date as one of its inputs, so a different ID is issued each day. The salt is itself replaced daily and deleted 48 hours later. Nothing we store carries one day's ID into the next.