Why we built a privacy-first analytics tool

Every time you open a website and a “We use cookies” banner pops up — annoying, right?

As developers we feel the same pain. Every new feature has to factor in GDPR, cookie consent, CCPA exemptions… and traditional analytics tools (Google Analytics, Mixpanel, Amplitude) make this worse every year.

The data vs. privacy dilemma

Traditional analytics tools use cookies because they want to track individual behavior paths:

User A:
  1. Visit /
  2. Click "See features" → /features
  3. Spend 2 minutes, scroll 80%
  4. Click "Get started" → /register
  5. Leave

Tracking at this granularity requires a unique identifier per visitor (usually a cookie). The cost:

• ⚖️ Legal risk (GDPR fines up to 4% of global revenue)
• 🐌 Performance overhead (cookies + third-party scripts)
• 🙅 User experience (clicking “Accept” every single time)

Our trade-off

Site Distiller takes a different path: track groups, not individuals.

What we collect:

• ✅ Visited URL
• ✅ Source (search, social, AI agent)
• ✅ Country/city (derived from IP, never store raw IP)
• ✅ Device type (desktop/mobile, no specific model)

What we don’t collect:

• ❌ Cookies
• ❌ User identifiers
• ❌ Cross-site behavior tracking
• ❌ Raw IP addresses
• ❌ Browser fingerprinting

What we still deliver

Even without individual tracking, we deliver most of the value:

Metric	Traditional tools	Site Distiller
PV / UV	✅ (requires cookies)	✅ (IP hash, rotated daily)
Source analysis	✅	✅
Page popularity	✅	✅
User path tracking	✅ (requires cookies)	❌ Not supported
Funnel conversion	✅	❌ Not supported
Cross-device tracking	✅	❌ Not supported

The core trade-off: 90% of websites want to know “which pages are hot, which sources work” — not “user John Smith viewed on three devices”.

The performance side-effect

No cookies → fast.

	Traditional analytics	Site Distiller
JS bundle size	30–100 KB	0 KB (server-side only)
First-paint blocking	Yes	No
Third-party requests	3–5	0
Privacy compliance	Banner required	Out of the box

Data sovereignty

Site Distiller is hosted on Alibaba Cloud (optimized for Asia-Pacific access). Self-hosting is planned for future releases.

Your data is yours. We don’t sell to advertisers, train models on it, or share with third parties.

Closing thoughts

Privacy-first isn’t a marketing tagline. It’s genuinely better:

• Less data = less legal risk
• Simpler implementation = better performance
• Smaller scripts = better user experience

We hope Site Distiller makes you rethink: what do analytics tools actually need?