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City or Region

Open simpleanalyticsbot opened this issue 4 years ago • 6 comments

It would be nice to not only get the country visitors come from, but also the city (or region) within the country. Many businesses operate in one country only, and for them it would be valuable to see get some more detailed location information.

Don't know if this is possible in a privacy-friendly manner.

simpleanalyticsbot avatar Nov 24 '20 15:11 simpleanalyticsbot

Seconded.

Aeyxen avatar Jan 29 '21 12:01 Aeyxen

@erwinmatijsen and @Aeyxen, I think it might be a great feature but it would require using the visitors IP address. We currently only use the time zone for detecting the location.

In my opinion using the IP is not privacy invasive because the IP will only be looked up in a IP table based on the first x numbers. The IP will not be stored (just like it works now) but will be used to do a quick lookup.

I'm not sure if most customers see this as privacy invasive or not. For our communication it's now easy to just say: we don't use the IP addresses at all. That's easy. But if we are going to use it I'm sure some potential customers might not understand the difference and see it as not privacy friendly.

adriaandotcom avatar Feb 01 '21 15:02 adriaandotcom

I think you are right, it would certainly trouble the water. Only workaround I can think of is to implement it, but disable it by default. You should still communicate it, but it can be something like:

By default we don't use IP addresses. If you want more detailed location data, you can enable looking it up via the first x numbers (without saving any IP address).

It's still a more complex message than you have right now though.

erwinmatijsen avatar Feb 03 '21 13:02 erwinmatijsen

Would be good to filter out for example traffic from Ashburn (biggest AWS datacenter town full of bots and spiders).

dailybits avatar Apr 02 '22 21:04 dailybits

Hard no from me. I'm currently using Plausible and they collect this information -- it's one of the things that's making me want to move away. City and region are too specific. Imo country gives you all the information you might need. I don't see any reason why a website owner would need to know a visitor's location with that level of specificity.

caincodes avatar Aug 17 '22 20:08 caincodes

Clear Yes from me – There are many websites or platforms that only operate within their own country. I run such a platform in Switzerland, for us it is extremely important to see from which cities or region the users come - countries are completely unimportant for us!

Hard no from me. I'm currently using Plausible and they collect this information -- it's one of the things that's making me want to move away. City and region are too specific. Imo country gives you all the information you might need. I don't see any reason why a website owner would need to know a visitor's location with that level of specificity.

plentii-platform avatar Aug 23 '22 16:08 plentii-platform