https://github.com/healeycodes/privacy-focused-analytics

🗃️ A toy analytics system for the web with a focus on user privacy.
https://github.com/healeycodes/privacy-focused-analytics

analytics flask tracking-pixels web-analytics

Last synced: about 1 month ago
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🗃️ A toy analytics system for the web with a focus on user privacy.

• Host: GitHub
• URL: https://github.com/healeycodes/privacy-focused-analytics
• Owner: healeycodes
• License: mit
• Created: 2020-08-09T00:35:56.000Z (over 4 years ago)
• Default Branch: master
• Last Pushed: 2020-08-25T17:01:13.000Z (over 4 years ago)
• Last Synced: 2024-11-30T12:36:49.840Z (about 2 months ago)
• Topics: analytics, flask, tracking-pixels, web-analytics
• Language: Python
• Homepage: https://healeycodes.com/privacy-focused-analytics-from-scratch/
• Size: 28.3 KB
• Stars: 8
• Watchers: 3
• Forks: 0
• Open Issues: 0
• Metadata Files:
  • Readme: README.md
  • License: LICENSE

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README

        
## Privacy Focused Analytics

> My blog post: [Privacy Focused Analytics From Scratch](https://healeycodes.com/privacy-focused-analytics-from-scratch/)




I wanted to learn more about web analytics so I budgeted myself a few hours and built a small analytics system.

It uses a Flask application with a SQLite database, and a HTML snippet to collect **anonymous user data** from any website.




### Features

- Uses a dynamic tracking pixel (optionally works without JavaScript)

- Collects information about:

  - What pages users visit

  - Where users are referred from

  - What browsers and screen sizes are used

  - Which country the user is from (without an API call)

- Lets you view analytics from different time slices




### Snippet

Include this on any page you want to gather analytics from.

Change `https://example.org` to wherever you host the Flask application.

```html

  const website = 'https://example.org'

  const url = new URL(website + "/pixel.gif")

  // '/'

  url.searchParams.append("path", location.pathname)

  // 'Analytics Test Page'

  url.searchParams.append("title", document.title)

  // 'https://www.google.com'

  url.searchParams.append("referrer", document.referrer)

  // '320,568'

  url.searchParams.append(

    "resolution",

    window.screen.width + "," + window.screen.height

  )

  const img = document.createElement("img")

  img.src = url

  // When the element exists in the DOM, the request is made

  document.body.appendChild(img)

  

  

```




### Setup

Download a free [GeoLite2 country database](https://dev.maxmind.com/geoip/geoip2/geolite2/) to `./GeoLite2-Country.mmdb`

`pip install -r requirements.txt`




### Run

`env FLASK_APP=analytics.py flask run`




The tracking pixel is hosted from `/pixel.gif`.

Note: It's likely that most ad blockers will stop the request.




There is a test page at `/` that will serve up the snippet for test purposes.




Analytics can be viewed at `/analytics`. Search parameters can be passed to view a time slice.

- (optional) `start` - The start of the time slice in UNIX seconds (inclusive). Defaults to `0`.

- (optional) `end` - The end of the time slice in UNIX seconds. Defaults to current time.




### Possible improvements

Hopefully none? This was a self-contained experiment to learn more about something 😊




License: MIT.