GDPR Compliant URL Shortener: Track Clicks Without Personal Data
Some links shouldn't track the people who click them: a QR code on a patient leaflet, a link in a letter from the council, a campaign where you've promised not to profile anyone. Linkly's privacy mode counts the clicks on a link or QR code without keeping anything that identifies the visitor.
Transcript
The full spoken transcript, split by chapter.
- 0:00Links that shouldn't track people
- Some links shouldn't follow people around. A QR code on a patient leaflet. A link in a letter from the council. You still want to know it's being used. You just don't want to know who used it. That's what privacy mode is for.
- 0:12What a click normally records
- Here's what a normal click leaves behind. The visitor's network address. Their city. The site they came from. The exact second. Turn privacy mode on, and none of that's kept. You get the click, the hour it happened, and whether it was a phone or a laptop. That's it. Why the hour and not the minute? Because an exact time can be matched against your own website's logs, and that picks one person out.
- 0:36Turn on privacy mode
- It's set per link. Open the link, and under Tracking and analytics, there's Privacy mode. Look, it spells out what's kept and what isn't. Switch on Record clicks anonymously.
- 0:47What switches off
- Notice what just greyed out. Tracking pixels, custom scripts, conversion tracking. They all exist to pass something about the visitor on, so they can't stay on. Save, and there's the badge. The short link didn't change. Neither did the QR code.
- 1:03What still works
- What still works is everything that decides where people go. I can change the destination whenever I like. Country redirects still work too. The country's used at the moment of the click, then thrown away.
- 1:16The click report
- And here's the report. Clicks by the hour, and what people were on. Country just says unknown, and there's a note right above it saying why, so it doesn't look broken.
- 1:26The catch: no unique visitors
- One honest catch. You lose unique visitors on these links. Counting someone twice means recognising them, and that's exactly what you've switched off. And it's no substitute for your own legal review. It just makes that review a lot shorter. Privacy mode is on the paid plans, and everything you need is just below this video.
