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by ellinoora 1893 days ago
Plausible tracks visitors without their permission. This is illegal in Europe where notice or consent or is needed, regardless of how cookies are used/not used.

More info: https://volument.com/learn/data-privacy

Note that I work at Volument.
2 comments
alichapman 1893 days ago
Does this change anything that the author has said? You haven't commented on whether or not you agree with them, you've just (rightly or wrongly) attacked their character.
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Booligoosh 1893 days ago
I assume you're referring to the fact that they don't respect the Do Not Track header? In my opinion this is fine because they don't 'track' visitors around the web as such, respecting the original intent of this DNT option.

I wrote a bit about this [here](https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts/issues/1346#issuecommen...), pasted below:

> I feel like a lot of this comes down to what "track" means, and what I as an average user am expecting when I enable "do not track".

> Personally, I feel like "track" means following me across multiple websites, or keeping a detailed record of my individual browsing habits on an individual site.

> If you think about what "tracking" means in real life, it means constantly following someone/something or monitoring it. If someone had one of those little infrared foot traffic counter things at the door to their shop, I wouldn't say they're tracking me as an individual. They're tracking how much foot traffic they get, but they're not tracking me.

> Both Plausible and Fathom are just like this. They don't keep the same user identifiers for more than 24h, they just take an anonymous count when you walk in the door to a site (along with a few other anonymous things like referrer). In short, as a user, I don't feel like my individual activity is being tracked to create a profile of my browsing, I just feel like the website is counting me when I walk in the door. They're tracking their visit stats, but they're not tracking ME.

> As cause enabling DNT, what I'm saying and expecting is "do not track ME". It's fine to track your usage stats, but don't track ME and build a profile of ME. So I would not expect services like Plausible and Fathom to do anything about this header, since they're not tracking me as an individual in the first place.

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