data privacy
I strongly recommend examining some of the key federal laws affecting online privacy:
1. The Federal Trade Commission Act (FTC)[1914]
2. Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) [1986]
3. Computer Fraud & Abuse Act (CFAA) [1986]
4. Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) [1998]
5. Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act (CAN-SPAM Act) [2003]
6. Financial Services Modernization Act (GLBA) [1999]
7. Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act (FACTA) [2003]
Taggings:
How can I make usage statistics of a website without breaching privacy?
I am running a small static website and would like to see statistics about unique visits. My understanding of popular solutions such as Google Analytics is that they track an excessive amount of user data I am not interested in. I would prefer to only count the number of unique visits and not collect any further data in order not to scare away privacy-conscious users. For the sake of making it easier to comply with the GDPR I would prefer not to share personal data with a third party; I would rather go for a self-hosted solution.
Currently, I do not process any data for which I need user consent. It would be greatly appreciated if a solution would not change that and require me to add a "cookie banner".
The first and probably easiest solution would be to use a cloud service from one of the many providers available e.g., Google Drive, iCloud, OneDrive, Amazon Drive and so forth. There are different pricing schemes, sharing options etc. and I would suggest you compare the available options and choose one that fits best for you and your family. By using such a cloud service, you benefit from a relatively easy setup process and already incorporated remote sharing. The downside is that you lose control over your files once they are uploaded to the cloud, from a data protection and privacy sense. You never truly know how your data is being handled and might also get caught up within a breach of your cloud service provider.
Alternatively, you may also consider setting up a small home server or a NAS (Network-attached Storage). There are many options for customers to choose from, depending on their technological know-how and how much control they want, although at least some technological know-how is required to properly set one up. These enable you to have a home shared drive as well as public ones. This can again be achieved with the right know-how or services provided by the manufacturer. Overall, they are more costly initially and more difficult to set up, but enable you to take control of your data, how it is accessed, who can actually view and edit it, track data access and much more.
