Is there a privacy friendly analytics tool that does not set cookies and store data Forever? I don't really care about perfect user analytics, just good enough. Maybe by analysing logs. In the 90's there was s lot of good tools like this, but now everybody has gone cloud. I can't imagine the tools offered today are compatible with GDPR.
You can configure Matomo [1] to both not use any cookies [2] and to automatically delete just the raw data or all data that is older than x months. Log Analytics is also possible.
If you want something that is far more minimalistic, but also Open Source and self-hostable, you can take a look at [3]. (Not sure about how they use cookies)
That said, there are solutions where a cookie allows for greater privacy because it allows you to leave sensitive data on the client versus having to store it on the server. For example, https://usefathom.com/ is an open-source self-hosted analytics tool that uses a cookie to enhance privacy.
I work on https://getmirrorshades.com
It doesn’t use cookies. Data is aggregated immediately and purged on a tight schedule. May be worth seeing if it is sufficient for your use case.
