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Staying honest about privacy

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I recently started testing a very small Google Ads campaign for PanicMode. That also meant adding a minimal Google attribution script to the website, which honestly felt a bit ironic for a privacy-focused project.

I still wanted to handle it in the most transparent way possible. The website now asks for consent before loading anything advertising-related, and PanicMode itself still runs fully locally without recording or uploading anything.

Trying to find the balance between growing a small indie project and staying aligned with the original privacy-first mindset behind it.

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I’m in the same boat developing a privacy focused app. It’s not easy to find the balance between analytics and privacy. What exactly would you be worry about google tracking? In my case the main focus is to protect photos and videos. So cloud storage and encryption is what I’m most concerned about. For analytics I split it between PII and others. Others are tracked in different platforms, including google analytics. PII on the other hand is only tracked and stored in European servers that comply with GDPR

 I’m intentionally avoiding collecting anything that could identify users. The only things I track are a few anonymous interactions that help me understand whether the website is actually useful.

For example I noticed a lot of visitors but very few downloads, so I added a live interactive demo directly in the browser so people can try the concept before installing anything. Right now I only track events like demo activations or download button clicks, without attaching personal information to them.

Unfortunately Google's script collects it's own information via cookies, and to comply with GDPR I have to make it transparent and ask for consent before loading it.

It does feel a bit ironic for a privacy-focused app, but I’d rather be upfront about it and keep data collection to the absolute minimum.

just explain to the users that you care deeply about the user experience, developing a great product, and protecting their privacy. I think most people would understand

 Indeed I want to be transparent about it, I also updated the , points 4 and 5 regarding cookies and 3rd party integrations.

Anyway I think no website should ever load any cookie tracker before the user gave consent first.

I am still surprised how many websites load their integrations before receiving the consent... Then when you "Reject All" you see a full page refresh because they have to unload their scripts... But that means that they already collected informations without your consent.