Cloudflare launching "Privacy-First" analytics tool

Cloudflare has announced that it is launching an analytics tool with an emphasis on user privacy and no individual tracking.

Called Cloudflare Web Analytics, this built-in tool caters to non-marketing web content creators by providing information that they need without sacrificing the privacy of their visitors. No client-side cookies or cache storage are used to track users, and no fingerprinting is used.

As an example of their "privacy-first" mentality when approaching metrics, the "visit" metric is based off of successful page loading from a non-internal source. This is still different from a "unique" metric, as it does not utilize individual user tracking. Despite this, the tool comes with flexible filtering options (countries, hostnames, and URLs) and drag-zooming time range and data dimension grouping that can allow you to, for example, figure out what exactly contributed to a surge in incoming web traffic.

Cloudflare Web Analytics will be available to both existing customers and people that don't actively utilize Cloudflare for DNS via a JavaScript-based tool. Anyone interested in using Cloudflare's analytics tool can sign up for the tool's waitlist at cloudflare.com/web-analytics.

Further coverage: The Cloudflare Blog