How it works

For a more in-depth technical explanation, you can read this blog post.

User privacy

fantomely tracks page views on your web page while preserving users' privacy. At its core, it only ever stores cumulative data points, so it is impossible to track any data point to a specific user.

On top of that, it only tracks data provided by the user's browser (such as referrers, platform information based on user agent, ...).

As all data is cumulative, and fantomely doesn't set any cookies or local storage, it is the most private-focused solution for tracking usage of your web page while still preserving your users' privacy.

Tracking script

Events are tracked using a small script that can be added to your web pages. The content of the tracking script is public and open-source, and it amounts to:

!function(){"use strict";window.addEventListener("DOMContentLoaded",(function(){var t=document.querySelector("script[data-fantomely]");if(t){var n="".concat(t.getAttribute("data-h"),"/api/event"),e=t.getAttribute("data-k");if(n&&e&&"undefined"!=typeof window){if(o(),window.history.pushState){var i=window.history.pushState;window.history.pushState=function(){for(var t=[],n=0;n<arguments.length;n++)t[n]=arguments[n];o(),i.apply(window.history,t)}}window.onpopstate=function(){o()}}}function o(){fetch(n,{method:"POST",body:JSON.stringify({k:e,p:window.location.href.slice(0,280),r:document.referrer.slice(0,280)})}).catch((function(){return null}))}}))}();

The tracking data sent to our servers is also kept to a minimum to limit bandwidth usage on your clients.

Valuable insights

You can gain useful insights for tracking data while protecting your user's privacy!

Cumulative timeseries and segmentations by page view, platform (browser, operating system), and referrers can give you a useful picture of the activity on your web pages.