Pulse Privacy
Zero-cookie, cookieless web telemetry platform for indie builders
What needed to be solved
Traditional web analytics platforms harvest intrusive personal data, require annoying cookie consent banners, and slow down site load speeds with massive tracker scripts.
How I engineered the solution
Designed a cookieless telemetry architecture that generates daily rotating salt hashes to track unique sessions without storing IP addresses or tracking cookies.
Core components & data flow
- Next.js App Router high-throughput API ingestion endpoint
- Cryptographic session hashing with daily server-side rotating salt
- Time-series chart dashboard rendered with Recharts and Tailwind CSS
The bottleneck & breakthrough
Differentiating legitimate unique visitors from repeated bot pings while strictly enforcing zero cookie storage and zero persistent device fingerprinting.
Engineering chronology & pivots
Attempted client-side local storage session tokens. This failed privacy principles because local storage tokens persist across visits and mimic tracking cookies.
Designed a server-side daily rotating salt hash (`SHA-256(IP + UserAgent + DailySalt)`), destroying raw IP logs immediately after generating anonymous session IDs.
Automated in-memory Redis hyperloglog counters for unique visitor counts, achieving 99% session accuracy with zero persistent disk logging of user identifiers.
What I Learned
How to structure privacy-first data models, avoid accidental PII logging in backend traces, and optimize time-series SQL queries for aggregation views.
Measurable Result
Prototyped a clean dashboard engine that provides direct traffic metrics with zero cookie notices and sub-1KB tracking script overhead.
Need high-performance web systems built?
I craft custom full-stack web platforms, local-first architectures, and accessible design systems. Let's discuss your project.