What Hone collects

Plain words, in full. Last changed 4 October 2026.

When you read a page that uses Hone, it keeps one anonymous record of that visit. The record is about the reading, not about you. There is no cookie, no account, and no ID that lasts after you close the tab, so one visit can never be linked to the next, even from the same device.

What one visit record holds

What	Why
When the visit started and when it was last active	To count visits by day
The site that sent you (the referring domain) and any campaign tags in the link	To show which channels bring readers
Country, state and city, worked out from your network address	To show where readers are, at city level. The address itself is used for that lookup and never stored.
Screen size class (phone, tablet, desktop) and browser language	To check the page works for everyone
Which chapters and pages you reached, and the last one	To show where readers stop
Active seconds: time the tab was open and you were scrolling, reading or moving	To tell a skim from a read
Counts of named actions: opened a source, shared, voted, clicked a link the site marked as a goal, sent a form	To join reading to action. Never what you typed into a form.
How fast the page loaded	To keep it fast

What it never holds

Your name, email or anything else that identifies you, unless you type it into a form the site itself runs (a sign-up, a vote with a name). That goes to the site's owner, in Australia, and only they can read it.
Your network (IP) address.
Anything from other sites, or from your device beyond the page you're reading.
An identifier that lasts between visits. There are no cookies and no fingerprints.

Where it goes

Records are stored in Google Cloud's Sydney region and belong to the site's owner, who is the only person who can read individual records. A site may show a public page: totals (how many read it, how far they got, where in the world they were), a globe with a face for each visit, and a feed of the last six hours.

The public page never shows a name or an identifier. Each face is drawn from a code made for that day's view, not from the record, so nobody can follow a reader from one visit to the next. On the globe, a place is named once three or more visits have come from it; below that, a visit sits at a point blurred to about 10 km and is labelled with its state or region. Readers on the page right now, and the feed, go no finer than a city (Adelaide, not the suburb), a state or a country, with times to the minute. The feed shows only arriving, the chapters reached and time spent: never what a reader did, where they came from, their device, or anything they typed. Once a reader does something on the page (a vote, a sign-up, a form), their visit leaves the feed and the reading-now view. From then on it appears only in the totals and as one unnamed face on the globe.

Hone does not sell data, does not use it for advertising, and does not pool it across sites except as anonymous totals for benchmarks, which a site owner agrees to when they join.

Opting out

Open any page on the site once with ?nostats=1 on the end of the address. That browser is then left out until you visit with ?nostats=0. Browsers that send "Do Not Track", and ad-blockers that block analytics, are simply not counted.

Questions

Hone is made in Adelaide. Write to hello@builtwithhone.com.