Privacy and data
What sonex collects, what it never collects, and how to get rid of it.
All pages
Privacy is the product, so it should be inspectable rather than asserted. This page is what actually happens.
What the tracker stores on your visitor’s device
Nothing. No cookies, no local storage, no session storage.
The one exception is a key you set yourself: sonex.disabled, which you can put in your own browser’s local storage to exclude your own visits (Install the tracker). The tracker reads it and never writes it.
Because nothing is stored on the device, there is nothing to consent to under GDPR or PECR, and no cookie banner to add.
What is collected
For each event: the website, the URL and page title, the referrer, screen size, language, and a timestamp. From the request itself: browser, operating system, device type, and a coarse country, region and city.
What the browser requests
The script tag itself, and events posted back to the same origin. Nothing is
fetched from a third party. The one extra request is sonex-vitals.js, and only
when your tag opts in with data-web-vitals="true" (Install the
tracker).
What is not collected
- No cookies or device storage, as above.
- No fingerprinting. Nothing is assembled into a persistent cross-site identifier.
- No raw network address is stored. It is used in the moment to derive a session signature and a coarse location, then it is gone.
- No precise location. City is the finest granularity, as a label, never coordinates.
- No personal data, unless you send it yourself with
identifyor event properties. Please do not (Custom events). - No session recordings.
How visitors are recognised without cookies
The website, the request’s network address and browser signature, and a rotating salt go through a one-way hash to produce a session id. The same browser produces the same id while the salt holds; the raw inputs are not stored and cannot be recovered from the id.
The salt rotates daily on the hosted service. Afterwards, the same visitor hashes to a completely different id. That is the mechanism that makes long-term tracking impossible rather than merely discouraged, and it is the reason returning-visitor counts across a rotation are not comparable.
See What the numbers count for what that means when you read the numbers.
Do Not Track
Do Not Track is honored when you turn it on, with data-do-not-track="true" on the script tag. It is not on by default.
Deleting data
- A website’s data. The Danger zone on a website’s Settings page deletes the site and every pageview, session and event it recorded. Permanent, and it asks first.
- Your whole account. Settings → Profile → Delete account purges every table keyed to you in one transaction: websites, events, sessions, reports, links, pixels, and the account itself. It asks you to type your email first, and it cannot be undone. One record survives on purpose: the account-activity trail, kept for security and accounting, and pseudonymised so the entries stay intact while no longer identifying you.
- Aging out. Rows past your plan’s retention window are deleted by a purge job. See Billing and plans.
Who the data belongs to
You. sonex does not sell it, does not share it with an ad network, and has nothing to sell to one even if it wanted to: there are no per-person profiles in the system.
The privacy policy is the legal version of this page.
Next: Account and preferences.