By Marcel Seibold, Founder of sendhey · Published 14 Jul 2026
sendhey never tracks a link visitor beyond what the access gate already asked for, and it never shows a cookie banner unless it is asking for something genuinely extra. That is a product decision (D-023), not just a feature — analytics is an explicit, per-link policy with four modes, not a default someone else silently picked for you.
Most link-tracking tools bolt a persistent visitor identifier onto every open by default, then treat the resulting consent-banner obligation as a UI problem for whoever embeds their pixel. sendhey built the other way around: pick the analytics mode when you publish, change it later, and it never invents an identity the access gate did not already establish.
A consent banner exists to ask permission for something identifying. Aggregate mode is built so there is nothing identifying to ask about: no email, no persistent cookie tying two visits together, no fingerprint. That is an architecture choice, not a policy loophole — the count is real (three opens, not zero); the honest tradeoff is that it can never say who. If you need who, you need an email gate and identified mode, and that is the one place a visible notice belongs, because identity is genuinely being collected there.
If you deliver client work through gated links, the tracking mode you choose is a decision you are making as a data controller in your own client relationship — not a technical default a vendor picked for you. Aggregate mode on a report you send a client processes no personal data about the reader, which is the simplest posture to explain if a client ever asks how you are tracking their team. Identified mode does process personal data — an email tied to an open — and needs its own honest basis, usually the legitimate interest of confirming a document reached the right recipient, which is why its notice sits next to the gate rather than buried in a privacy policy nobody reads before opening a link. None of this is legal advice, and it does not replace your own assessment or agreement with your client — it is a description of what each mode actually does, so you can make that assessment honestly instead of guessing what a third-party tracking pixel is quietly doing on your behalf.
Pick the mode from the publish form's "what you need back" step, or set {"analytics":{"mode":"aggregate"}} (or "identified", which requires an email, domain, or allowlist gate) inside policy when an agent calls publish_page or create_link. Change a link's mode any time from its settings — the new mode applies going forward; it never retroactively re-tags activity already recorded under the old one.
Identified mode only ever knows what the gate collected — an email address, not a name, role, or company unless the recipient volunteers it. Aggregate mode's whole point is that it cannot answer "who," and that is the tradeoff, not a bug to file. Behavioral mode's deeper insight depends on the recipient actually accepting the consent prompt; declining still lets them read the content, it just means less detail for you. For the access gates that make identified tracking possible in the first place, see password-protecting a Claude artifact or ChatGPT report; for the mode-by-mode walkthrough on the product itself, see track who opened your shared reports.
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Written by Marcel Seibold, founder of sendhey.
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