most cookie policies are confessions written by lawyers. mine is a confession written by me.
i’m om yaduvanshi, 18, an applied ai developer building cloudline, a cookieless analytics tool. day 22 of 90, building in public.
the policy a cookieless product keeps anyway
cloudline sets no cookies. stores no ip addresses. nothing gets saved on your visitors’ devices. a pageview stores exactly four things: page, referrer, screen size, time.
so why does the site have a cookie policy page at all? because not having one looks like you forgot, and looking like you forgot is worse than overexplaining.
what the policy actually says
the short version: there are no cookies to declare, so it says what’s stored instead. four fields. pages stored as path and query only, no fragments, no domain. no user agents. no fingerprinting.
there’s also a “what we’ll never do” list on the features page. it lives on the site, and it means more there than quoted in a blog post.
why write it at all
conventional wisdom says privacy pages exist to satisfy regulators. the honest alternative: for a small tool, the privacy page is the sales page. nobody trusts a one-person analytics product on vibes. they trust it because you wrote down exactly what you collect, in plain words, and there’s nothing surprising in the list.
the page costs nothing to maintain. every time someone asks “but what do you actually store?” i send the link instead of typing the answer.
the caveat
none of this is legal advice. it’s only about my own product: cloudline itself sets no cookies and needs no consent banner for its analytics. i’m not telling you what the law requires anywhere. i write code, not disclaimers.
what i will say: if your tool collects almost nothing, write the almost-nothing down. short and exact. say it plainly and move on.
day 22 of 90. still building.
free while in early access. no card.
— om
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