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Liwan

Cookie Banners And Analytics Consent

Liwan does not use cookies for visitor tracking, does not store raw IP addresses, and does not create persistent cross-site identifiers. That reduces privacy risk, but it does not automatically prove that your site can skip analytics consent banners everywhere. Liwan provides configuration options; it does not determine whether your specific deployment requires consent.

The Short Version

Section titled “The Short Version”
  • Cookie-free does not always mean consent-free.
  • ePrivacy-style rules can depend on how data is collected or accessed, not only what is stored.
  • National interpretations differ, especially in Europe.
  • Liwan gives you privacy controls, but it does not decide whether your setup needs consent.

Practical Approach

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If you want the safest legal posture, ask for consent before loading or sending analytics events.

If you want to avoid a banner, treat that as a legal and product decision rather than a default property of Liwan. Document what Liwan collects, choose conservative settings, and review the relevant jurisdictions for your audience.

Conservative Liwan Settings

Section titled “Conservative Liwan Settings”

These settings reduce collected and stored data. They do not guarantee that consent is unnecessary.

  • Visitor grouping: Random per request to avoid linking requests by IP address, User Agent, or other repeatable visitor signals. Avoid Accurate mode unless you have assessed consent requirements.
  • Geolocation detail: No geolocation lookup.
  • Session metrics: Do not track unless bounce rate, time on site, entry page, and exit page are needed.
  • UTM parameters: Do not track unless campaign attribution is needed.
  • History retention: keep it short, such as 6 months.
  • Drop rules: exclude internal, test, local, or sensitive traffic before storage.

If you still need approximate visitor estimates, consider Network standard or Network balanced, understanding that IP-derived grouping may still need legal review in some jurisdictions.

Technical Scope of ePrivacy

Section titled “Technical Scope of ePrivacy”

The EDPB clarified in Guidelines 2/2023 that Article 5(3) can apply to more than cookies, including some cases where information from a user’s device or browser is collected or used for tracking-like purposes.

Liwan’s tracker sends a small client-side payload: page URL, referrer, event name, a coarse screen-width bucket, and orientation. The server derives browser family, platform family, and device type from the request’s User-Agent header rather than storing full browser or OS version strings.

Using Network standard or Random per request reduces fingerprinting risk in visitor grouping because those modes do not use the User Agent in the visitor grouping hash.

Section titled “If You Need A Consent Gate”

Liwan does not currently include a consent manager. You can gate tracking from your site by setting a local storage item:

localStorage.setItem("disable-liwan", "true");

When this is set, the tracker script will ignore all events. You can wire this up to your consent banner:

  1. Store the visitor’s consent choice in your own consent system.
  2. For an opt-in setup, set localStorage.setItem("disable-liwan", "true"); by default before Liwan loads, and remove it only after consent is granted.
  3. For an opt-out setup, set the disable-liwan local storage item if they deny consent.

Because Liwan is open source, you can also modify the tracker or event endpoint for stricter requirements.

Further Reading

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