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offen.software
offen.software

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Meeting our standards

We are building Offen, a fair and lightweight web analytics software that treats operators and users as equal parties. Here is what we have achieved in the past weeks.

Statistics about the location of visitors had been on our to-do list for a fairly long time. Yet implementing it in a way that met our privacy standards proved to be a veritable challenge. After careful consideration and intense research, we finally decided on an approach based on time zones.

To derive the geographical location, this method does not rely on an IP database, but asks the browser for the selected time zone and tries to assign it to a country. This fully protects the privacy of users and provides sufficiently accurate results for analysis as well.

Furthermore, we have addressed the issue of user awareness in Offen. Since the only direct link to the User Auditorium is in the consent banner, it was important for us to provide additional features to increase the attention of users. Widgets now give operators the opportunity to easily integrate a reference to the User Auditorium. Preferably with a link on every page.

While there are still a few improvements on the agenda, with the implementation of location statistics we are a major step closer to v1.0. Be sure to stay tuned and follow us here or on Twitter and Mastodon for the next release updates.

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