Many of the analytics tools out there give analytics, and even marketing, a bad name. For more than 15 years since it was made available in 2005, Google Analytics has been the go-to tool for businesses. It has been proven way too many times that even if it is advertised as free, it comes with a crucial cost: Breach of people's privacy and abuse of people's psychological vulnerabilities to make more profit.
My personal disturbance about the data abuse became more bothersome as I kept coming across news articles about big companies like Google and Facebook abusing the data they collect. Fortunately, there have been some developments, both regulatory and public opinion-wise. There are academics doing research on the social and psychological impacts of surveillance capitalism, and as a result, lawmakers are making new regulations to stop this misconduct.
This, though, doesn't mean that the problem is solved. Since there hasn't been anything stopping big companies from collecting, processing, and exploiting people's personal data for years, now there is a habitual pattern of "drifting with the tide" and not really caring about data privacy among the makers. No one is to blame, after all, this is what all of us found ourselves in without even noticing.
What is the solution then? Well, expecting everybody to stop all these existing detrimental tools altogether at once is not realistic. What we should do instead is, we should build safe equivalents to these tools and invite and accommodate other people.
That is where PoeticMetric comes in. PoeticMetric is a free as in freedom, privacy-first, open source, regulation-compliant, and blazingly fast analytics tool. And these are the four principles followed in the making of the PoeticMetric:
PoeticMetric's primary principle is based on the Free Software Foundation's free software definition and the focus on information privacy.
In order to represent a step forward to solve the surveillance capitalism problem software freedom and the data privacy focus is the principle we uphold above all.
You probably heard the saying, "if you don't pay for the product, you are the product.". Google Analytics is free of charge because Google uses your website's visitor data to discover future patterns in the visitor's behavior and sell that to their own customer for ads. This is not a secret, it is their business model. This is not the case for PoeticMetric. The data collected from your website is 100% yours. We don't sell or monetize your data in any way.
Technically speaking, in order to prevent abusive behavioral analysis, we don't collect, process, or encrypt any personal data; we don't use any technology that will allow anybody, even us, to pinpoint any individual.
We say we don't do any harm. If you don't take my word for it, you can see it yourself: PoeticMetric's full source code is publicly available.
Since the collected data is 100% yours as the site owner, you can choose to export all the data or purge it irreversibly at any time.
There are all these analytics tools for the sake of the same thing: Marketing. At PoeticMetric, we might have a different approach when it comes to privacy. Still, in the end, we are here to deliver the tool businesses need to get insights about their visitors and make decisions accordingly. There are few other tools trying to accomplish the same goal as PoeticMetric: Privacy-focused analytics. Sometimes we call them competitors, but sometimes comrades.
In order to be sustainable, we need to stay ahead of this competition. So, we have to offer a secure, fast, practical, and easy-to-use service. We keep that in mind while deciding on components that we pick to rely on, provisioning the infrastructure and provider to run the platform on, choosing features to implement with our limited workforce. We work hard to offer the best solution you need for your analytics needs.
We are a for-profit, bootstrapped US company, and we rely solely on the revenue we generate. It might mean that we miss some advantages that VC-backed startups have, like great media exposure or access to a bigger talent pool. However, not having investors to please, lets us focus on what we believe is important and not compromise.
Since we don't have the option to spend money we don't make, we must be sustainable. No "build now, monetize later" attitude also means no "free plan". We have to charge from day one.
I hope PoeticMetric suits your business' needs, if not, don't hesitate to let us know, there is always room for improvement, and we are ready.
Cheers,
Gokhan