there's a spinning globe on my analytics dashboard. none of the dots are real.
i'm om yaduvanshi, 18, an applied ai developer building cloudline, a cookieless analytics tool. day 17 of 90, building in public.
the globe
the live visitors view has an interactive globe. little dots light up across it. it looks like it's showing where your visitors are.
it isn't. those are sample locations. labeled. the dots are decoration, and i put that in writing rather than letting anyone assume otherwise.
why the dots can't be real
real locations need IP addresses. or something equally creepy. cloudline stores no IP addresses. it sets no cookies. it doesn't read user agents. a pageview is four things: page, referrer, screen size, time. that's the whole row.
so the globe faces a choice. fake dots, or no globe. i kept the globe with the label, because a live view that looks dead feels broken, and feelings do matter in software. but the dots will never become real. that's not a bug list item. it's a refusal.
what every analytics tool picked
every analytics dashboard had to answer one question: how much do you want to know about strangers. the big ones answered "everything" and wrote a privacy policy about it. i answered "four things" and wrote a privacy policy about that instead.
the trade is real. i can't tell you which city your traffic is from. i can't tell you if that visitor from tuesday came back thursday. GA4 can do both of those, and it pays for them with a consent banner that eats your numbers.
the honest-limit part
here's what the globe actually tells you: nothing. it's the garnish. the useful part of the live view is the count and the pages. today's visits, in real time, with nobody identified.
i could make the globe smarter. that's the sentence i say out loud whenever the temptation shows up, because admitting the trade keeps me from quietly crossing it. sample dots forever, or the globe goes. that's the deal.
free while in early access. no card.
— om
Top comments (0)