Cookieless analytics without the asterisks
Privacy
"Cookieless" has become a marketing word more than a technical one. A lot of tools that use the label still fingerprint devices using canvas rendering, font lists, or screen resolution combinations, which raises the same privacy questions cookies do, just without the word "cookie" attached.
We wanted to be specific about what Nocturna actually does, because the difference matters if you're the one explaining it to a DPO or a customer who asks.
What we don't do
No cookies, first-party or third-party. No canvas or font fingerprinting. No persistent device identifiers that follow a visitor across sessions without their knowledge. No cross-site tracking of any kind.
What we do instead
Nocturna counts sessions using a rotating, non-identifying token that resets on a fixed schedule and can't be linked back to an individual across that reset. It's enough to compute accurate session counts, funnels, and retention within a defined window, without building a persistent profile of any single visitor.
This is a real trade-off. You lose the ability to track one specific person's behavior across months, which some tools offer. We think that capability is rarely worth what it costs in consent complexity, legal review time, and (frankly) trust, especially for the kind of product-usage analytics most teams actually need week to week.
Why this matters for EU teams specifically
Under most current interpretations of GDPR and the ePrivacy Directive, tools that don't set identifying cookies or build persistent profiles generally fall outside the scope of consent-banner requirements. That's not legal advice, and you should have your own counsel confirm it for your specific setup, but it's why most teams running Nocturna don't run a cookie banner for analytics purposes at all.
We keep a one-page summary in the docs written specifically for whoever on your team has to sign off on this, so that conversation takes an afternoon instead of a quarter.
