web analytics

GoatCounter is an open-source solution to this problem that respects privacy concerns and can be self-hosted. It calculates a hash of a site identifier, the user agent and the IP for each request. That way, unique visitors can be counted without saving any data from which a person could be identified. Unfortunately, this approach is somewhat imprecise since IPs are transient. A user who changes the wireless network also changes their IP address. However, there seems to be no correction for this that does not involve collecting a whole lot more data.