Privacy Mode: Count Clicks Without Collecting Personal Data

Some links should not track the people who click them. A QR code on a patient leaflet, a link in a public-sector letter, a helpline number on a poster, a link sent to a group you have promised not to profile: you still need to know the link is being used, but you don't want, or aren't allowed, to collect personal data about each visitor.

Privacy mode handles this one link at a time. The link and its QR code keep working exactly as before, and you can still change where they point. Clicks are still counted, but each click is recorded with nothing that could identify the person who made it.

What privacy mode records

Click times are kept to the hour, not the second. An exact timestamp can sometimes be matched against the destination website's own logs to pick out an individual visit, so we don't keep one.

Your visitor's IP address still has to reach our servers to deliver the redirect, as with any website. For a privacy-mode link it is used only for that, and for bot filtering at the moment of the click, then discarded. It is not stored in your click data, our analytics database or our application logs.

Settings privacy mode switches off

Some link settings exist to collect or pass on information about the visitor, so they can't be combined with privacy mode. Turning privacy mode on switches them off for that link:

• Tracking pixels (Meta, Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, TikTok, LinkedIn and the rest)
• Custom tracking scripts
• Conversion tracking
• Webhooks
• Click notifications

They stay visible in the link editor, greyed out and marked Off in privacy mode, so it's always clear what the setting is doing:

Webhooks deserve a special mention. A webhook arrives the moment someone clicks, so even an empty one would reveal the exact second of the visit. Privacy-mode links therefore send no click webhooks at all, including to webhooks set up for your whole workspace, and they don't appear in the live click feed.

If you turn privacy mode off later, these settings stay off. Nothing is switched back on without you choosing to.

What still works

Everything that decides where a visitor goes, rather than records who they are:

• Editing the destination. Change the link or QR code's target whenever you like.
• Country and device redirects, link rotation, expiry and password protection. Country and device are used at the moment of the click to choose the destination, and are not stored.
• Custom domains, UTM tags and forwarded parameters.
• Bot blocking.

Analytics for a privacy-mode link

Click totals, the daily (and hourly) chart, browser and device-type reports, and bot filtering all work as normal. Reports that rely on personal data stay empty: location, internet provider, referrer, URL parameters and unique visitors. The analytics page explains why, so an empty report doesn't look like missing data:

Privacy mode and GDPR

Privacy mode is designed for links where collecting personal data is a problem: patient-facing material, where even knowing that someone scanned a QR code on a medicine leaflet can count as health data; public-sector communications; or any campaign where you have committed not to profile the audience.

Because a privacy-mode link stores no IP address, location, identifier or exact timestamp, its click records contain no personal data about the visitor. That makes it much simpler to describe in a data protection impact assessment or a medical-legal review. You should still check how your own organisation's requirements apply. Our GDPR page covers how Linkly handles data for ordinary links.