Statistics that need nothing to consent to

Most analytics on small business websites arrives with a banner attached. The banner is there because the analytics stores something on the visitor, and something stored on the visitor is something to ask about.

Recognition without an identifier

The built-in statistics take a different route. A visitor is recognised for the day by hashing the request against a salt that rotates, rather than by writing an identifier down. The previous salt stays usable briefly, so an evening session survives midnight. After that, the ability to recognise that visitor is simply gone.

Nothing is stored on the visitor. Nothing is handed to a third party.

What the banner is still for

The consent banner ships with the platform and it is not decoration. Its analytics category genuinely gates scripts rather than pretending to, and it arrives with Dutch, English, German and French copy already written.

The point is that it is now for the things you choose to add, rather than for the counting the site does by default.

What you can still answer

Which pages get read, where people arrived from, what kind of device they used, and roughly where they were. Aggregated into daily rollups rather than kept as a pile of raw events forever. For a small business those are the questions that were being asked anyway.