Why Donut Browser Doesn't Collect Any Telemetry

Most software collects some form of telemetry — usage metrics, feature engagement data, behavioral analytics. Even privacy-focused tools often justify collecting “anonymous” data to improve the product. Donut Browser ships with none of that. No usage tracking, no analytics endpoints, no phone-home requests.

This is not an oversight. It is a deliberate choice, and here is why.

Telemetry contradicts the mission

Donut Browser exists to give you control over what you share online. The entire product is built around the idea that websites should not be able to track you across profiles, link your identities, or collect data without your meaningful consent.

A privacy tool that quietly sends your usage patterns back to a server — even “anonymized” — would undermine the very thing it promises to protect. If the browser is supposed to prevent tracking, it should not be doing any tracking itself.

Some anti-detect browsers go even further in the wrong direction. Dolphin Anty, another anti-detect browser, generates a unique machine ID for every installation and uses it to track users even after they reinstall the app. This is the kind of practice that treats users as products rather than people, and it is fundamentally at odds with what privacy software should be.

Donut Browser was built to make privacy accessible to everyone — not just technically inclined users. That means the tool itself has to respect the same principles it enforces for the websites you visit. A privacy tool that collects your data would be a contradiction.

Open source means real accountability

Donut Browser is fully open source under AGPL-3.0. The entire codebase is available on GitHub for anyone to inspect. If you want to verify that there is no telemetry, you can read the source code yourself.

This also means there is a direct channel for bug reports and feature requests. If something breaks, users report it as a GitHub issue. If it gets reported, it is an issue worth looking into — and the report comes with steps to reproduce, system details, and often a conversation that leads to the root cause. A telemetry event that says “button clicked 47 times” tells you almost nothing useful by comparison.

Hundreds of tests catch what telemetry cannot

The project has hundreds of unit and integration tests that run on every change. Every commit goes through automated testing to verify that core functionality works correctly before it reaches users.

This is a more reliable safety net than telemetry. Usage analytics might tell you that a feature is rarely used, but they will not tell you whether it works correctly. Tests will. And they do it before the code ships, not after users encounter the problem.

When you combine comprehensive test coverage with an open issue tracker, you get a development workflow that does not need telemetry to maintain quality. Issues are caught either before release (by tests) or after release (by users who care enough to report them).

Analytics rarely surface useful insights

Having worked in large enterprises where in-app analytics were treated as gospel, I can say from experience that the vast majority of product decisions that actually matter come from user interviews and direct feedback — not from dashboards showing how many times a button was clicked.

Analytics tools are good at telling you what happened. They are bad at telling you why. Knowing that 30% of users dropped off at step 3 of a flow is interesting, but it does not tell you whether the flow is confusing, slow, or simply unnecessary. A five-minute conversation with a user will.

For a project like Donut Browser, direct feedback through issues and conversations with users provides more actionable insight than any analytics dashboard. The features that matter most are the ones users ask for, not the ones suggested by a funnel chart.

Privacy should be the default

The web has normalized data collection to the point where most people assume every application is tracking them in some way. This is exactly the problem Donut Browser is trying to solve — not just for browsing, but by example.

If a privacy tool can function without telemetry, so can most software. The choice to not collect data is not a sacrifice. It is a statement that user trust matters more than vanity metrics, and that good software can be built without surveillance.

Donut Browser will continue to ship with zero telemetry. If you have feedback, open an issue or send an email to contact@donutbrowser.com.