Keep EU visitors’ personal data in the EU

Lots of analytics software claims to comply with various privacy laws, such as GDPR, PECR or the ePrivacy Directive, but most of them are putting you and your website visitors at risk.

Data Isolation was built in collaboration with EU legal experts, and is part of our commitment to simplify your compliance.

EU visitors’ personal data stays in the EU. Anonymized analytics are stored on our US infrastructure. Privacy laws will keep changing, and we want to process data in the country it belongs. The EU and the US are the two biggest markets for that today. This feature exists for all customers on all plans and happens without any programming or setup required.

Here’s why Fathom is your best option for GDPR compliance

No other analytics software goes to the measures we do to comply with GDPR, and do it in a way that doesn’t hurt your SEO or page speed load times.

	Google Analytics	Other analytics	Fathom
Protects visitor personal data	No	Sometimes	Yes
Anonymises visitor logs	No	Sometimes	Yes
Processes EU traffic in the EU	No	Sometimes	Yes
Processes US traffic in the US	Yes	Yes	Yes

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Why data isolation matters

It doesn’t matter if an analytics company is located in the EU. What matters more is how and where they process data and whether EU visitor IP addresses reach US-servers.

If you’re a company in the EU, all of your EU traffic is processed on our EU servers, located within EU borders, ensuring your visitors' IP addresses never reach US infrastructure.

If you’re a company outside the EU, then you still will no doubt have visitors from the EU. Fathom takes care of routing all your EU visitors to EU-servers for you, automatically.

Since Fathom is a Canadian corporation (eh), we’ve implemented strict Data Isolation, allowing you to comply with GDPR while ensuring EU visitor IP addresses never reach US-servers.

Data isolation explained: EU visitors are hashed and anonymised in the EU, then stored as anonymous data. Visitors outside the EU are anonymised on US servers.

Data Isolation means intelligently routing your visitors

Fathom’s Data Isolation method works by intelligently routing visitors to the right place to process their data. When we say “data,” we’re talking about the user’s IP address, which, along with a User-Agent, could be used to potentially identify an individual in the EU, making it “personal data.”

If a visitor is outside the EU, our EU-owned CDN (Bunny.net) sends their pageview to our US servers directly and anonymize their "data" (IP address).
If a visitor is inside the EU, our CDN sends their pageview to our European servers and anonymize their data immediately. The IP Address (personal data under GDPR) is stripped from the request inside of the EU and never reaches our US infrastructure. The anonymous data is then stored on our main US servers for fast and easy retrieval on our customer dashboards, but there’s zero Personal Data associated with any of it.

In all scenarios, Fathom fully protects the privacy of every website visitor’s personal information.

You can read more about our data journey and compliance practices.

In every case, Fathom anonymises visitor data before it is stored.

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Frequently asked questions (and answers)

How fast and reliable is your EU infrastructure?

Our EU Cloud is monitored 24/7, highly available, multi-region and has enough capacity to process Bieber-level traffic. And, as usual, this feature is available to all customers on all plans.

How do I enable Data Isolation?

If you’re a Fathom customer, then congratulations, you’re already using Data Isolation and complying with privacy laws! We enable this by default for everyone on every plan.

Is Data Isolation available to me on my current plan?

Yes. Every plan includes Data Isolation, including the smallest. It’s enabled by default.

Why process and anonymize an IP address in the first place?

Whenever you visit a website, your IP address and User-Agent are sent to that website's servers (that's just how the internet works). Some websites retain raw logs of that information, keeping tabs on what you're browsing. Whilst others (i.e Fathom Analytics) guarantee that your visit is anonymized and not used against you. You can read more about this on our data journey.