Author
Ethan Brooks
Solutions Engineer
Author · 9 articles · 14 glossary terms
Covers SDKs, API integrations, and data implementation, with an emphasis on validation, system interoperability, and troubleshooting.
Articles by Ethan Brooks
9 articles
Analytics · Nov 6, 2026 · 6 min read
Data residency: what it means, the laws, and how to map your analytics data
Data residency is where your data is physically stored. How it differs from sovereignty and localization, the main laws (GDPR, PIPL and others), why analytics is affected, and a worked mapping of nine data flows.
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Analytics · Nov 5, 2026 · 6 min read
Data retention policy: legal basis, a sample schedule and how to enforce it
A data retention policy sets how long each type of data is kept and how it is deleted. The legal basis (GDPR, CCPA), what to include, a sample schedule for analytics data, and a worked example of moving from "keep everything" to 13 months.
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Analytics · Nov 5, 2026 · 6 min read
Privacy by design: the 7 principles, GDPR Article 25 and a worked example
Privacy by design builds privacy into products from the start. The seven principles translated into team practice, what GDPR Article 25 requires, a tracking-plan review that cut personal-data fields from six to one, and a checklist.
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Growth & Marketing · Nov 4, 2026 · 4 min read
Third-Party Data: What It Is, When It Helps and How to Test It
Third-party data is collected by a company with no direct relationship to the people it describes, then sold or shared. How it differs from first- and second-party data, where it still helps, its risks, and how to test a vendor’s accuracy before you rely on it.
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AI Search · Nov 3, 2026 · 6 min read
robots.txt Disallow All: What It Blocks, What It Doesn't, and Safer Variants
Two lines in robots.txt ask every crawler to stay off your whole site. What they actually do, what they do not (they do not hide URLs or protect anything), common variants and how Google resolves conflicts, and how to check which crawlers obey.
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Analytics · Nov 3, 2026 · 6 min read
GDPR-Compliant Analytics: A Checklist for Choosing and Setting Up a Tool
No analytics tool is GDPR compliant by itself; compliance depends on what you collect and how you set it up. A checklist of what to check in any tool, tied to the regulation text, with the matching settings in TapCub.
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AI Search · Nov 3, 2026 · 6 min read
GPTBot: OpenAI's Four Crawlers and How to Control Each One
GPTBot is OpenAI's training crawler, one of four OpenAI agents with independent robots.txt settings. What each does, what opting out changes, rules for common goals, and how to verify and check them in your own data.
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Analytics · Nov 3, 2026 · 6 min read
Mobile App KPIs: A Short List with Exact Counting Rules
Mobile app KPIs grouped into growth, engagement, retention, quality and revenue, with the counting rules that change the numbers and how to read them by app version and install channel.
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Analytics · Jun 9, 2026 · 9 min read
How to migrate from Google Analytics 4: an 8-step checklist
Migrations fail on definitions, not on snippets. Eight checks in order, from the event inventory and metric mapping to the parallel run, history export and the day you remove the old tag.
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Glossary terms by Ethan Brooks
14 glossary terms
Glossary
Browser fingerprinting
Browser fingerprinting identifies a browser by combining many attributes it exposes, such as user agent, screen size, time zone, languages, installed fonts and how it renders canvas graphics, into an identifier that survives clearing cookies.
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Glossary
Compliance centre
The place in the console where privacy is configured per site: cookieless or identification mode, consent requirements by region, IP truncation, retention, child mode and deletion requests.
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Glossary
Cookieless analytics
Measuring visits without storing anything on the visitor's device.
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Glossary
Data clean room
A data clean room is a controlled environment where two or more parties can join and analyse their first-party data, usually matched on hashed identifiers, under rules that let each side see only aggregated results rather than the other’s raw, person-level records.
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Glossary
Data governance
Data governance is the set of roles, rules and processes that decide who owns each data set, how it is defined, who can access it, how its quality is checked, and how long it is kept, so that data can be trusted and used safely.
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Glossary
Data minimization
Data minimization is the privacy principle that you should collect, use and keep only the personal data that is adequate, relevant and necessary for a specific purpose, in the least identifying form and for no longer than needed.
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Glossary
First-party cookies
A first-party cookie is a cookie set by the website shown in the address bar, either by its server or by a script running on its pages.
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Glossary
GDPR / CCPA / PIPL
The three privacy regimes most sites meet: the EU's General Data Protection Regulation, California's Consumer Privacy Act and China's Personal Information Protection Law.
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Glossary
Hashing
Turning a value into a fixed-length string that cannot be reversed.
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Glossary
PII
PII (personally identifiable information) is any information that can identify a specific person, either on its own (a name, email address, ID number) or when combined with other data (a ZIP code plus birth date plus gender).
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Glossary
Pseudonymization: definition, techniques and how it differs from anonymization
Pseudonymization is the processing of personal data so that it can no longer be attributed to a specific person without additional information, which is kept separately and protected (GDPR Art.
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Glossary
Third-party cookies
A third-party cookie is a cookie set by, and sent to, a domain other than the site shown in the address bar, typically by an embedded ad, tracking pixel, social button or widget.
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Glossary
Tracking pixel
A tracking pixel, or web beacon, is a tiny, usually invisible image or script embedded in a web page or email.
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Glossary
Zero-party data: definition, examples and how to use it
Zero-party data is data a customer intentionally and proactively shares with a brand, such as preferences, purchase intentions, goals and how they want to be contacted, as opposed to behavior a company observes (first-party) or buys (third-party).
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