Afternoon HN.

I’ve been working to address the concerns previously voiced by fellow hackers. I underestimated the amount of passion some would have for data privacy. Thanks again to everyone who donated a few minutes to educate me.

Pathview no longer uses a salted and hashed IP to count unique visitors. I’ve removed the metric entirely and replaced it with “unique sessions” which is more congruent with my intention. I would not have arrived at this solution without HN. Originally, I was returning a .gif in response to the JavaScript trigger, which now returns a timestamp. The conversion report now highlights first touch, last touch, and multi-touch content paths. Pathview content attribution is a (single channel) platform for conversion optimization. I now realize conversion attribution was too broad a term for this application. Users can implement a Do Not Track mechanism should they need such functionality. I will not make GDPR claims until I’ve consulted with a lawyer. Though, my intention is to be just that.

The underlying capture mechanism leverages 160-characters of JavaScript to capture two pieces of information: the current page and the referring page. The script then returns a time-stamped response. Post-response, I store three pieces of data derived from the visit: the base domain, current page, and referring page.

My general approach to post-processing represents an iteration and improvement over old-school log analytics. There are two main differences: I do not capture or store the visiting IP address and Pathview is a cloud solution rather than a self-hosted application. Also, disabling JavaScript prevents the visit from being recorded. In time, some ad blockers will impact visit captures too.

I still have content to write and a short to-do list before I start beta testing. I know I need to explain what I do and how I do it to build trust. Does anyone have questions, concerns, or recommendations? I would welcome any insight. I’m prepared to listen and adapt as necessary.

Note: I turned the Pathview script off for this post. It will not capture your visit.

Original Post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32480811