Privacy Policy

1. Introduction

Argusmetrics is privacy-first web analytics. We run it as a hosted service at argusmetrics.io, and the source code is also public under the AGPL-3.0. This Privacy Policy explains what we hold, and it covers two different kinds of data:

• Your account data. The email address and password you register with. For this we are the data controller.
• Your visitors' analytics data. What the tracking script sends us about traffic to the websites you have added. This is collected on your instructions, so you are the data controller and we act as your data processor.

If you run your own copy of the software instead of using our hosted service, none of that data reaches us: your instance is yours alone, we have no access to it, and you are the controller for everything it collects.

2. What Information Is Collected

2.1 Your Account

To use the hosted service you create an account. We store:

• Your email address, used to sign in, to verify the account, to send password resets, and to send the email reports you opt into
• A hash of your password, never the password itself
• Login sessions, so you stay signed in, and short-lived verification codes
• A log of emails we sent you: the address, the type, the subject and whether delivery succeeded, so we can debug failures

We do not ask for your name, your company, a phone number or any payment details, because the service is free and we have no use for them. Browsing the public pages of this site requires no account and sets no cookies. If you email us, we receive whatever you choose to put in the message.

2.2 Your Visitors' Analytics Data

When you add the tracking script to your website, it sends us the following about each pageview, and we store it on our servers on your behalf:

• Page path: which page was visited, with sensitive query parameters stripped before storage
• Referrer: where the visitor came from, and any UTM campaign parameters in the link
• Country: looked up from the IP address using a local database, after which the IP is discarded
• Device and browser type: derived from the User-Agent, plus screen dimensions
• Timestamp, and how far down the page the visitor scrolled
• A visitor hash, described in section 2.3
• Any custom properties you choose to send with an event. These are entirely under your control, so please do not put personal data in them.

2.3 How Visitors Are Counted Without Cookies

To tell one visitor from another without a cookie or a stored identifier, we compute a hash from the visitor's truncated IP address (the last octet removed for IPv4, the address shortened to its first three groups for IPv6), their User-Agent, your site's domain, and a salt that changes every day. Only that hash is stored.

Because the salt changes daily, the same person visiting tomorrow produces a different hash, so we cannot follow anyone from one day to the next. Because the domain is part of the input, the same person on two different sites produces different hashes, so we cannot follow anyone between sites either. The full IP address is never written to disk. There is a longer walkthrough on our data page.

2.4 What We Never Collect

About your website's visitors, we never collect or store:

• Cookies of any kind
• IP addresses
• Persistent or unique device identifiers
• Browser fingerprints
• Anything that would let us follow a person across websites, or from one day to the next
• Names, emails or other directly identifying details, unless you deliberately put them in a custom property

3. How Information Is Used

3.1 Your Account Data

• To sign you in and keep you signed in
• To verify your email address and let you reset your password
• To send the email reports and traffic alerts you switch on, and nothing you have not asked for
• To answer support questions you send us

We do not use your email address for marketing, and we do not sell or rent it to anyone.

3.2 Your Visitors' Analytics Data

We process it only to provide the service to you, which means:

• Calculating the figures shown in your dashboard, such as pageviews, visitors, top pages and referrers
• Producing the goal, funnel and revenue reports you have configured
• Generating the email reports and traffic alerts you have switched on
• Building any export you request

We do not use it for our own purposes, do not combine it with data from other customers, and do not sell it or share it with advertisers.

4. Data Storage & Security

Your data is stored in a PostgreSQL database on a server we operate ourselves, hosted with Bahnhof in Sweden. It stays there. We do not replicate it to other regions, and no part of it is processed outside the EU.

• In transit: all traffic to the dashboard and the tracking endpoint is served over HTTPS
• Passwords: stored only as bcrypt hashes, never in a form we could read
• Access control: only you and the team members you invite can see your websites' data, and invited members get the role you choose (owner, admin or viewer)
• Least privilege: the application connects to the database with an account that can read and write rows but cannot alter the schema
• Retention: analytics events are kept for 24 months and then deleted automatically each night. Two years because the dashboard lets you look at a full year and compare it against the year before, which needs both years to still be here, and no longer than that. Deleting a website deletes its data immediately, and closing your account deletes everything belonging to you. Email delivery logs, which contain recipient addresses, are removed after 90 days.

No system is perfectly secure, and we do not claim otherwise. If you discover a security problem, please tell us rather than posting it publicly, and we will fix it as quickly as we can.

5. GDPR Compliance

5.1 Who Is Responsible for What

For your account data we are the data controller, and our legal basis is performance of a contract: we need your email address to give you an account at all.

For your visitors' analytics data you are the data controller and we are your processor. We process it only on your instructions, which in practice means only to run the features you have switched on. Deciding the legal basis for measuring your own visitors is your call as the controller. Given how little is stored, and that none of it is an identifier we could resolve to a person, legitimate interest under Article 6(1)(f) is a basis controllers commonly rely on here. That is an observation, not advice: satisfy yourself of it for your own situation, and note that anything you send in custom properties is yours.

5.2 No Cookie Consent Required

Argusmetrics sets no cookies and reads nothing from your visitors' devices, so it does not trigger the consent requirement that cookie banners exist to satisfy. You may still need a banner for other tools on your site.

5.3 Your Rights Over Your Account Data

You can see and change your email address in the dashboard, export your data as CSV or JSON at any time, and delete your account, which erases your account and the analytics data belonging to your websites. For access, correction, portability, erasure or a complaint, email us and we will respond within 30 days. You also have the right to complain to your national data protection authority. Because we operate from Sweden, ours is Integritetsskyddsmyndigheten (IMY), and you may complain to them or to the authority in your own country.

5.4 Requests From Your Visitors

If one of your visitors asks you to access or erase their data, there is generally nothing to retrieve or delete: what we hold is a hash that changes daily and is not linked to a person, so we cannot single out one individual's rows even if asked to. If you receive such a request and need help answering it, contact us and we will assist you as your processor.

6. Third-Party Services

We keep the list of third parties as short as we can. The dashboard loads no third-party scripts, fonts or analytics: everything it needs is served from our own servers, which is also why the dashboard makes no outbound requests while you use it.

Two third parties are involved in running the service:

• Bahnhof (Sweden), which operates the physical server the database runs on. They provide the hardware and the network; they do not process your data for any purpose of their own.
• Lettermint® B.V. (Netherlands), which delivers verification emails, password resets, and the reports and alerts you opt into. It receives your email address and the contents of those messages. Lettermint runs on European infrastructure, with its primary servers in the Netherlands and backups in Germany.

Country lookups are done against a local database on our own servers, so your visitors' IP addresses are never sent to any third-party geolocation service. We never share data with advertising networks or data brokers, and we do not sell data to anyone.

7. Data Sharing & Disclosure

We do not sell, rent or trade your data, and we do not share it with anyone except the providers listed in section 6, who process it only so we can run the service.

We may disclose data if we are legally required to, for example in response to a valid court order. If that happens we will tell you unless we are legally prohibited from doing so. If the service were ever transferred to someone else, we would tell you beforehand so you could export your data and close your account first.

8. Children's Privacy

Argusmetrics is not intended for children under 16. We do not knowingly collect data from children.

9. Changes to This Policy

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. Significant changes will be reflected here and in the project repository. The "Last updated" date above indicates when this policy was most recently revised.

10. Contact Us

If you have questions about this Privacy Policy or your data, contact us: