This is a good explanation, it is good to know what goes on behind the curtains =)

Thanks for this post. Good to know that you take your users’ privacy seriously, something that cannot be said at all about certain other sites (whose whole business model depends on collecting and monetizing the information their users create).

But just for the sake of completeness, you should mention (please correct me if I am wrong) that you store the complete click-stream for every user (who has flattered what and when) in a non-anonymized fashion indefinitely (even after revenues for the previous month have been settled), and that this data is retained even after the user deletes his account. No criticism, and of course you are doing this because of legal requirements (the nature of which a blog post such as this one seems ideal to explain).

Thanks for your explanation! I think the point “Flattr button on 3rd party websites” is very important for privacy in Germany. We got a heavy debate about the facebook like button and that is not legal to use it at websites, because it collects data from anybody also from not logged in facebook users.