I'm building Privatrak, a privacy-focused analytics tool, and wanted to see how the others handle personal data in URLs. Stuff like ?email= on a signup confirmation, password reset tokens, /unsubscribe/someone@example.com, an access_token after the # on an OAuth callback. You don't really think about it, but every page view sends the full URL to the analytics provider. So I loaded 9 addresses like that with Plausible, Fathom, Simple Analytics, Umami, Pirsch, Matomo, PostHog, Mixpanel and Privatrak installed, standard snippet each, and logged what got sent. Plausible, Umami, Pirsch, Matomo, PostHog and Mixpanel sent pretty much all of it as is. Emails, the reset token, a JWT in the query, the access token in the hash. Mixpanel also put the full URL into its session recording uploads. Fathom and Simple Analytics are better since they just cut off the query string and the hash, but that also throws away stuff you'd want like ?page=2 or search terms. And an email in the path still went through for every tool except mine. To be fair, almost all of them let you fix this. There's usually a hook or setting to strip or rewrite the URL before it's sent. But you have to know about it and set it up yourself, and most people just paste the snippet and move on. I didn't think about it either until I started building this. And this matters more than it sounds. A lot of people pick a cookieless tool so they can skip the consent banner, but no cookies doesn't mean no personal data. If emails and tokens end up at your analytics provider, that "we don't need a banner" argument gets a lot shakier, and I think most people never check. Privatrak redacted all 9 by default, but it's not free either: it replaces numeric path segments with :id, so /blog/2026/10/post shows up as /blog/:id/:id/post. Still figuring out if that's the right tradeoff. Code and raw results if you want to check or rerun it: https://github.com/Privatrak/cookieless-analytics-test Whole comparison (storage, ad blockers, pricing): https://privatrak.com/blog/cookieless-analytics-tools   submitted by   /u/Latter-Mix2317 [link]   [comments]