How to delete your Fathom Analytics account

About deleting your Fathom Analytics account

Fathom Analytics is a lightweight, privacy-focused alternative to Google Analytics that provides developers and website owners with simple, actionable insights without tracking personal data. It uses a custom-built infrastructure designed to avoid the complexities of cookie-based tracking and invasive data harvesting, making it a popular choice for those prioritizing visitor anonymity.

While Fathom prides itself on user privacy, you may eventually decide to close your account. Common reasons include migrating to a different observability platform, shutting down a project, or strictly adhering to data minimization policies by removing unnecessary analytical accounts. Deleting your account ensures that you are no longer storing historical pageviews or site referral data on their specialized servers.

Key features of Fathom that may influence your account management decisions include:

• Aggregated, non-PII website traffic reporting.
• No permanent cookie-based tracking across multiple sessions.
• Compliance with GDPR, ePrivacy, and CCPA through minimalist data collection.

What happens to your data

When you initiate the deletion process for your Fathom Analytics account, the system marks your entire organizational data for removal. Because Fathom does not collect personally identifiable information (PII) of your end-users, there is no need to worry about personal visitor data, but your account-level data will be permanently wiped.

Data removed upon deletion includes:

• Website traffic statistics and pageview counters.
• Referrer data and site-specific performance metrics.
• Historical logs associated with your account's dashboard.
• Configured site domains and API access tokens.

Fathom Analytics generally adheres to strict retention policies. Once the deletion is confirmed via email, your data is scrubbed from their active databases. While backups may exist momentarily for system integrity, these are overwritten according to their standard disaster recovery rotation, effectively making your historical analytical data unrecoverable.

Privacy considerations

Fathom Analytics distinguishes itself by not storing personal data such as IP addresses or user agents in a retrievable way. They hash IP addresses on the fly, ensuring that you as a site owner never even see full IP logs. This architecture is designed to make the service 'privacy-by-default'.

When considering your privacy and the deletion of your account, keep the following in mind:

• Ensure you export any necessary report CSVs before deleting, as there is no 'undelete' functionality.
• Deleting your account removes the tracking snippet’s ability to send data, effectively ending all data transmission to Fathom.
• Fathom does not share site-specific data with advertisers, so closing your account is primarily a way to clear your own project metadata rather than stopping a surveillance machine.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is it possible to recover a deleted Fathom Analytics account?

No, deleting your account is a permanent action that removes all associated configuration and historical stats. You will need to create a new account if you wish to use the service again.

Does deleting the account remove the tracking script from my website?

No, you must manually remove the Fathom JavaScript snippet from your website's HTML source code after the account is deleted to stop the script from attempting to call Fathom's servers.

Will deleting my account notify my website visitors?

No, visitors are not notified when you close your analytics account, nor do they see any change on your website, provided you remove the script from your source code.

Is there a waiting period for account deletion?

There is no long waiting period, but you must click the link provided in the confirmation email sent to your registered account email address to finalize the process.

Does Fathom keep my billing information after deletion?

Fathom utilizes third-party payment processors like Stripe. While your analytic data is removed, you should check your Stripe customer portal if you wish to manage or remove stored payment methods separately.

Can I export my data before closing my account?

Yes, Fathom provides built-in tools to export your traffic data as CSV files; it is highly recommended to do this before hitting the 'Delete account' button.