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Privacy modes

Privacy modes explained

Voris gives you a choice of how much visitor data to collect. The choice is called a privacy mode, and it is set per site. You pick it when you create a site, but you can read more about each one below so you know what is available and what is coming next.

Why this exists

Most analytics tools collect everything by default. That is useful for marketers, but it also means you usually need a cookie banner, a privacy policy, and consent flows. Voris lets you pick how much you want to collect. If you only need basic traffic insight, you can skip cookies entirely.

Mode A — Aggregated (the default)

The short version: Mode A collects anonymous pageview counts and rough country/device breakdowns. No cookies, no visitor IDs, no tracking across pages. You will not need a cookie banner just for analytics.

What you get on your dashboard:

  • Pageviews total
  • Unique pages viewed
  • Top countries, top cities (rough)
  • Top browsers, operating systems, device types
  • Top referrers (where visitors came from)
  • Top pages (what they looked at)
  • Top UTM sources (campaign tags in the URL)
  • Core Web Vitals (if you enable them in site settings)

What you do not get in Mode A:

  • Unique visitors (we cannot tell two visits apart without an ID)
  • Bounce rate (requires knowing whether a visit was one page or more — which means sessions)
  • Session duration, pages per session
  • Entry pages and exit pages
  • Goal conversions tied to a specific visitor

You will see some of these fields labelled Available in Mode B+ on your dashboard. That is expected — it just means they turn on once Mode B is enabled for your site.

When Mode A is a good fit:

  • You run a simple marketing site, blog, or landing page.
  • You want to keep things cookie-banner-free.
  • You mainly care about traffic volume, where visitors come from, and what pages are popular.

Mode B — Balanced (available)

Mode B adds session-level analytics — unique visitors, bounce rate, session duration, pages per session, and entry/exit pages — without third-party cookies and without a cookie banner. It is available to switch on yourself on most accounts (a staff kill switch can pause it): choose Mode B when you create a site (the setup and add-site wizards show a short privacy disclosure and a link to the DPIA guide before you continue), or switch an existing site to Mode B any time from Settings → Privacy & data.

How Mode B protects privacy — the important part:

  • No cookie, no browser storage. The browser tracker is identical in every mode and never reads or writes document.cookie, localStorage, sessionStorage, or IndexedDB. Nothing is stored on or read from the visitor’s device, which is why Mode B does not require a cookie-consent banner for analytics.
  • The visitor ID is derived on our servers, never on the device. For each human request we compute a short, one-way visitor ID from the visitor’s network address and browser, keyed by a secret daily salt. The raw IP address is used only for a moment to derive that ID and a rough location, and is then dropped — never logged, never stored.
  • The daily-salt guarantee. That secret salt is generated fresh every day at midnight UTC and destroyed within 48 hours. Once a day’s salt is gone, that day’s visitor IDs can no longer be recomputed or linked back to any device or person — so re-identifying a past visitor becomes impossible. A different salt each day also means the same visitor gets a different ID tomorrow: there is no stable, long-lived identifier.
  • The midnight bridge. Because the salt rotates at midnight UTC, a visitor who is mid-session right at the rotation would normally get a brand-new ID and have their visit split into two. To avoid that, for a short overlap window we recognise the continuing visit and keep it as one session. The bridge is read-only, we never store a link between the two days’ IDs, and the old salt is still destroyed within 48 hours.

Our wording for what Mode B is. While our external data-protection review is in progress we use this conservative description, and we ask you to use it too rather than overclaiming:

Pseudonymous while the daily salt lives, anonymous after destruction; processed under legitimate interest (Art 6(1)(f)); no cookie banner required because no information is stored on or read from the user’s device (ePrivacy Art 5(3) is not engaged).

We deliberately do not claim, unqualified, that Mode B “collects no personal data,” is “fully anonymous,” is “GDPR compliant,” or is “exempt from” any specific data-protection law. While the daily salt is alive the visitor ID is pseudonymous personal data, and you remain the data controller for your site.

Before you switch a site to Mode B, read Privacy Mode B — privacy posture & DPIA guidance. It explains the cookie-banner position, what to put in your privacy policy, and when you may need a Data Protection Impact Assessment.

Mode C — First-party (coming soon)

Mode C is aimed at product analytics use cases where you already have signed-in users. It will let you send your own opaque user IDs along with events, so you can track behavior across sessions, build funnels, and measure retention.

Mode C is labelled Coming soon and will need some setup on your side — usually involving a developer. A full guide will ship with that phase.

Switching modes later

You can change a site’s mode from Settings → Privacy & data. A few things to know:

  • Historical data does not convert. Sessions and unique visitors only exist from the moment a site is in Mode B onward; switching does not retroactively populate Mode B fields for past Mode A traffic (and vice versa).
  • Moving up a mode (A → B) asks you to confirm. Mode B processes pseudonymous personal data, so the switch shows a short disclosure and links to the DPIA guidance above before it takes effect.
  • You can move back down. Switching B → A simply stops deriving visitor IDs again; no banner, no confirmation needed.

Which mode should I pick today?

For most simple marketing sites, Mode A is all you need and keeps you cookie-banner-free. Choose Mode B when you specifically want unique visitors, bounce rate, or entry/exit pages and you are comfortable describing it in your privacy policy as pseudonymous, legitimate-interest processing. Mode C is for product analytics with signed-in users and is not available yet.

Connecting AI assistantsPrivacy Mode B — privacy posture & DPIA guidance