Simplytics

Opt out of being counted

Simplytics counts visits on websites that use it. It sets no visitor cookies, but temporarily stores a keyed daily hash that links visits on one site during one day. Some page paths and event names can also identify a person. You may simply not want to be counted — and you can say so without asking anyone, paying anything, or trusting us to honour a form.

Turn on Global Privacy Control in your browser and, unless the site has switched this off, Simplytics sends nothing at all. Not a reduced record, not an anonymous one: the script stops before it makes any request, so no data about your visit ever reaches us to be discarded.

How to turn it on

The signal is a published web standard, not something we invented, and it works on every site that honours it — not only ones using Simplytics.

Two things we would rather tell you than have you discover

On a site that offers its own switch

Some sites add a “Don't count my visits” link. Using it stores one flag, simplytics_ignore, in that site's own browser storage, with no identifier. From then on the script sends nothing from that site, even if the site has switched off the Global Privacy Control check. The flag is limited in ways a browser signal is not: it stays on that site in that browser only, so it does not reach your other devices or other sites, and a site with and without www. keeps separate storage. Safari can delete it after seven days of browsing without you interacting with the site, clearing the site's data removes it, and it cannot be set at all where the browser blocks site storage. To cover other sites too, also turn on Global Privacy Control, which reaches every site that honours it.

If you run a site: add that switch

A site relying on the UK PECR “statistical purposes” exception needs a simple, free way for visitors to object, and the ICO says a browser setting alone is not enough. Put a switch where visitors see it, such as your footer, as well as in your privacy notice:

<button type="button" id="simplytics-optout">Don't count my visits</button>
<script>
document.getElementById('simplytics-optout').addEventListener('click', function () {
  try { localStorage.simplytics_ignore = '1'; window.location.reload(); }
  catch (e) { this.textContent = 'Your browser blocks site storage, so this switch cannot work here.'; }
});
</script>

If your site's Content-Security-Policy blocks inline scripts, put the script lines in one of your own script files; in React or Vue, run the same statements from the button's click handler. The switch stores only that flag, on your own site, when the visitor chooses it. To be counted again, run localStorage.removeItem('simplytics_ignore') in the browser console on your site. The same flag is a simple way to keep your own visits out of your statistics. Whether your site can rely on the exception at all still needs your own assessment.

Not being counted on simplytics.dev

We count visits to our own public pages with Simplytics too. Global Privacy Control stops that, and so does this switch, which stores the same one flag, simplytics_ignore, in this site's storage in this browser:

It works on simplytics.dev only. It cannot reach other sites that use Simplytics, because each site keeps its own browser storage.

What we did not do

There is no form here that stops counting everywhere, because a choice made here could not reach the sites you visit: each site keeps its own browser storage, and a form would need an account, an identifier or a cookie to key your objection to. Simplytics collects none of those, which is the entire point of it. So the options are the browser signal, which works on every site, and a site's own switch, which works on that site. The privacy policy sets out what is collected when you are counted.