What link statistics can tell — and what we store

Most link trackers are deliberately vague about what they record. This page is the opposite: the exact list, in plain language, plus the parts we chose not to build.

Last updated: September 2026 · 5 min read

Tracking is off by default

Worth stating first: when you create a link here, nothing about its visitors is recorded unless you switch on "Track clicks". No recording by default, no silent upgrade later — a link created without tracking stays untracked for its whole life. That's a design decision, not a setting we might flip.

What you get when tracking is on

• A counter. How many times the link was opened, and when it was last opened.
• Timestamps. Each visit is recorded with a date and time.
• A rough location. Country, region and city level, derived from the visitor's IP address using an external geolocation lookup (ip-api.com). It's an estimate, not a fact — VPNs, mobile networks and corporate proxies routinely put people somewhere else entirely.
• A shortened IP address. More on this below — it's stored in anonymized form, which is the important part.

You read the numbers through the private stats link shown once after creation. There's no account and no dashboard — if you lose the stats link, the data is still recorded but effectively yours only in spirit.

What we deliberately don't collect

• No raw IP addresses. Before anything is stored, the last part of the address is discarded: an IPv4 address is truncated to its /24 network (e.g. 203.0.113.0 — the "123" is gone), IPv6 is truncated to /48. That's enough for a city-level estimate, not enough to identify a visitor. This applies to everything we log — clicks, note views, page views — and older rows were converted to match when we made the change.
• No cookies for the tools. The shortener and notes don't set tracking cookies and don't follow you around the web. (The advertiser's scripts on the page are a separate matter, described in the privacy policy.)
• No cross-site profiles. We don't merge data into user histories, sell it, or share it with data brokers. There's no "audience segment" for sale here, because there's no audience stack behind it.
• No link-to-person mapping. The stats tell you "eight clicks, mostly Hannover, this week". They cannot tell you who clicked — and that's a feature.

How long it stays

Tracking data — clicks, views, page visits — is automatically deleted after 90 days by a scheduled cleanup job. Nothing accumulates forever, and there's no archive. The link itself stays until it expires or is deleted; only the visitor-level records age out.

The short version: you get a useful, honest sketch of how often a link was opened, in roughly which part of the world, and when — and none of the parts of tracking that make the news. Anything the privacy policy contradicts, the privacy policy wins; it's the binding version of this page, in German, because that's the jurisdiction we operate in.