Introduction

Glass's User Anonymization Algorithm

Privacy-First

Glass is a web analytics platform designed to respect user's privacy, while simultaneously providing website owners enough information to make business decisions.

Glass does not use cookies, device fingerprinting, or any other unethical tracking technology.

IP Addresses

Glass does not store IP addresses or similar personally identifiable information.

Glass uses IP addresses at our ingest edge in order to calculate:

  • Country
  • Anonymous Session ID

Limited Lifetime Session Identifier

Glass uses an innovative anonymizing session identifier to maintain sessions.

Our algorithm is as follows:

session_id = md5(current_date_UTC + ip_address)

Every night at midnight UTC, the salt for the md5 hash changes, and the sessions are reset.

The md5 hash is irreversible and the IP address cannot be derived from it.

Data Collected

The data our ingest script collects are:

  • Limited lifetime session identifier
  • Timestamp of click
  • Querystring-normalized URL of page
  • Cloudflare Geo-IP Header (country, city)
  • UTM parameters, if provided
  • Ad network query key, if provided. We do not store the click ids.
  • Browser version
  • Viewport size
  • External link clicks
  • Viewport clicks x & y coordinates
  • Time on page

Data is transmitted in a single payload using beacon at the end of the page view.

Data is always anonymous and is designed to provide fully actionable analytics without compromising individual user privacy.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do you collect personally identifiable information about users?

No.

Glass was designed with privacy in mind. We only collect anonymized, aggregated statistics.

Do you collect IP addresses?

No.

When data arrives at our edge, IP addresses are immediately hashed with an irreversible algorithm.

The seeds for algorithm are rotated at midnight UTC.

Where is data located?

We operate a global edge network through Cloudflare; users communicate with the servers closest to them.

Data is hashed at our edge, and then transmitted to our central database, which is located in the EU.