Privacy policy
Written for the person running the software, in language a reader can actually check. Micaforge measures traffic rather than individuals, and this document says exactly what that does and does not mean.
Micaforge is open-source software that other people install. This document is written so an operator can adapt it, and the parts only an operator can fill in are marked [LIKE THIS]. It has not been reviewed by a lawyer, and nothing on this page is legal advice.
If you are running Micaforge: read every section, replace every placeholder, delete what does not apply to you, and have somebody qualified check the result before you publish it. If you are a visitor reading this on somebody's site and it still contains placeholders, the operator has not finished, and you should ask them.
1. Who this document is for
[OPERATOR NAME] (“we”) runs an analytics installation at [ANALYTICS DOMAIN] and uses it to measure traffic to [YOUR SITES]. This document describes what that installation records.
The software is Micaforge, which is AGPL-3.0 and self-hosted. Nobody but us operates it, and it makes no outbound network call while it runs, including for geolocation. Your data does not reach the authors of the software, because there is no path by which it could.
2. What is collected
When you load a page that carries the tracking script, the following is recorded.
- The page. The address you visited, its title, the query string and fragment, and which page you entered and left on.
- Where you came from. The referring site, and any campaign parameters in the link you followed.
- Your device, in categories. Browser and version, operating system and version, device type, screen and window size, language and time zone.
- Roughly where you are. Country, region and city, derived from your address and then discarded. Map coordinates are the coordinates of the city, not of you.
- What you did. Time on the previous page, how far you scrolled, and any custom events the site chose to send.
- How fast the page was. Standard web performance measurements.
- A visitor identifier. Not a name and not a cookie: a one-way hash of a daily secret, the site, your address and your browser string. It changes every day and cannot be reversed. Tomorrow you are a different visitor to us.
[If session replay is enabled, say so here.] Replay records the structure of the page and your interactions with it so a visit can be watched back. Delete this paragraph if you have not turned it on.
[If the site calls identify(), say so here.] A site can attach its own account identifier to events for signed-in users. That is a deliberate choice by the operator, it is off unless the site's code calls it, and it is the one place where data here can be tied to a person.
3. What is never collected
- No raw IP address is ever stored on a visitor's record. It is read when the request arrives, turned into a country, a region, a city and a network operator, folded into the daily hash, and dropped. There is no column for it.
- No browser string is stored on a visitor's record. It is read to work out the browser, operating system and device type, and those categories are what is kept.
- No cookie is set and none is read.
- No cross-site tracking, no advertising identifiers, no data sharing.
- No fingerprinting beyond the daily hash described above.
4. Cookies and local storage
The tracking script sets no cookies. It writes one value into your browser's local storage, mf-opt-out, and only if the site gives you an opt-out control and you use it. That value stays in your browser and is never sent anywhere.
The dashboard we use to read the statistics sets a session cookie for the people who log into it. That is us, not you.
5. Records of machines
Micaforge also records requests from software rather than people: search crawlers, AI agents, link previews, monitoring tools. Those records are kept in separate tables and carry more detail than a person's record does, including the full client string and a salted hash of the source address, because none of it describes a human being.
If a request of yours is misclassified as a machine, the effect is that it appears in a table of machine traffic rather than in the visitor statistics. It is still not linked to you, and no further data is collected about it.
6. Why it is lawful to collect
[This section needs your own decision and your lawyer's.] The usual position for cookieless, aggregate measurement in the EU and the UK is legitimate interests under Article 6(1)(f) of the GDPR: understanding how a site is used, with no profiling, no personal identifiers and no cookie requiring consent under PECR.
That position depends on facts about your site and not only on the software. If you have enabled replay, if you call identify(), or if your page addresses themselves carry personal data, the analysis changes and you may need consent. Decide it deliberately and write the answer here.
7. How long it is kept
[State your retention period.] By default Micaforge keeps event history indefinitely and session replays for thirty days. An operator can set a retention period, after which whole months of history are dropped.
The daily secret used to build visitor identifiers is never kept beyond forty-eight hours, which is what makes yesterday's identifier permanently unlinkable to today's.
8. Who else sees it
[List anybody who does. If nobody does, say so.] On a standard self-hosted install the data sits on our own machine at [HOSTING PROVIDER, COUNTRY] and is shared with nobody. There is no third-party analytics service behind this, no advertising network, and no data broker.
We may publish aggregate statistics, and we may share data where the law requires it.
9. Your rights, and their limits
Where the GDPR or a similar law applies to you, you have rights of access, correction, erasure, restriction, portability and objection.
There is a real limit worth stating rather than hiding. Because no cookie is set, no address is stored and the visitor identifier changes every day and cannot be reversed, we usually cannot find your data in order to show it to you or delete it. Nothing in the store points at a person. That is a consequence of collecting less, not a refusal to help, and under Article 11 of the GDPR we are not required to collect more data purely to be able to identify you.
Where an account identifier has been attached to events, that is different: tell us the identifier and we can find and delete those rows. You can also stop collection entirely by using the opt-out control at [LINK, IF YOU OFFER ONE], or by any browser setting or extension that blocks the script.
10. Children
The site is not directed at children, and nothing collected here identifies anybody of any age. [Adjust if your site is aimed at children.]
11. Changes
If this document changes materially we will change the date at the top and, where the change affects what is collected, say so on the site.
12. Contact
Write to [CONTACT ADDRESS]. [If you have appointed a data protection officer or an EU or UK representative, name them here.] You may also complain to your local supervisory authority.