What's actually being tracked?
Not a feature table — an ordinary shopping trip, step by step. Here's what a typical GA4-plus-ad-pixel stack collects at each moment, next to what Mitr collects for the same moment.
Click a step, or run the simulation to watch each one fire in order.
1. You land on the page
Typical stack
- Analytics cookie written to your browser (e.g. _ga) — a random ID good for ~2 years
- Ad pixels (Meta, Google Ads) each drop their own third-party cookie or ID
- Full IP address logged, often retained indefinitely
- If cookies are blocked, a device fingerprint (screen size, fonts, timezone, GPU) is computed as a fallback ID
Mitr
- One event: page_view
- No cookie written, nothing read from your device
- Server derives a token from the request's IP + user agent, then discards the IP
- The token rotates tomorrow — it can't be reused to link today's visit to a future one
2. You look at a product
Typical stack
- Product-view event tied to your persistent cookie ID
- Synced to ad exchanges' real-time bidding pools within milliseconds — this is the moment retargeting starts
- Session-recording tools, if installed, may capture mouse movement and scroll depth under the same ID
Mitr
- One event: product_viewed, tied only to today's rotating token
- Nothing is synced to an ad exchange — there isn't one in the pipeline
3. You add it to your cart, then leave
Typical stack
- Cart-abandonment event fires, enriching your cookie ID with a "high purchase intent" signal
- That signal is often shared onward to ad networks so they can retarget you elsewhere
Mitr
- One event: item_added_to_cart
- No signal leaves the pipeline — there's no ad-network integration to share it with
4. That evening, an ad for the same product follows you to another site
Typical stack
- The ad network matches its cookie/ad-ID against the one it captured earlier, and serves the retargeted ad
- This is the visible symptom — every step before it is what made the match possible
Mitr
- Doesn't happen — there's no persistent ID for any ad network to match against
By the numbers
| What gets collected | Typical stack | Mitr |
|---|---|---|
| Cookie set on your device | Yes — usually several (analytics + each ad pixel) | Never |
| Device fingerprint | Common fallback when cookies are blocked | Never |
| Raw IP address retained | Often, for geolocation and fraud checks | Discarded immediately after deriving today's token |
| Cross-site ad-ID matching | Yes — this is what powers retargeting | Not possible — no persistent ID exists |
| Same visitor recognizable day-to-day | Yes, often for months or years | No — the token rotates every 24 hours |
| Consent banner required | Yes, in most jurisdictions | No storage event occurs, so no |
A note on how this page works
The "typical stack" column describes how this category of tooling generally behaves, not a live capture of any specific vendor's current network traffic — exact behavior varies by configuration and changes as vendors update their SDKs. The Mitr column is the actual mechanism: see the Trust & Compliance page for the full technical breakdown, or why we built analytics without cookies for the short version.
See also Mitr vs Google Analytics 4 and how Mitr compares to other privacy-first tools.