Platform telemetry & data sources

Communly is a cooperative-aligned platform. We instrument the product so operators can answer questions like "did residents discover Group Buy after onboarding?" — but we do it with privacy by construction: every analytics event is org-scoped and stripped of personal information before it ever leaves your browser or our servers.

PostHog (product analytics)

Product funnel and feature-usage analytics — e.g. what % of signups complete org-join, which features are used in the first week, where people drop off in the create-group-buy flow.

What is collected

  • Anonymous/pseudonymous member ID (opaque UUID — not your email or name)
  • Organization ID (org_id) for per-co-op cohort analysis
  • Named funnel events (e.g. signup_started, group_buy_create_succeeded) — the event name and which form field was interacted with, never the field’s value

What is never collected

  • Email addresses
  • Full names or display names
  • Street addresses or precise postal codes
  • Any free-text you type (comments, vendor names, descriptions)

Opt-out

PostHog is platform-instance-only. Self-hosted Communly instances ship with the PostHog key absent, so they emit zero product analytics by construction (no runtime flag to forget). See docs/self-hosting/observability.md.

Sentry (error tracking)

Full-stack error and crash reporting so platform operators can fix bugs that affect co-ops.

What is collected

  • Anonymized (hashed) user ID
  • Organization ID tag
  • Stack traces and error messages (PII-scrubbed before send)

What is never collected

  • Email, name, phone (scrubbed by lib/sentry/scrub-pii.ts)
  • Request bodies / form data

Opt-out

Self-hosted instances configure their own (or no) Sentry DSN. Empty DSN = no error reporting leaves the instance.

Vercel Analytics + Speed Insights

Aggregate page-load performance and Web Vitals for the hosted platform.

What is collected

  • Aggregate page-load timings
  • Web Vitals metrics

What is never collected

  • Personal identifiers
  • Cross-site tracking cookies

Opt-out

Applies to the hosted platform only; self-hosted instances do not run Vercel Analytics.

This page is maintained under Story 99-94 (PostHog product-analytics instrumentation) and Story 14-7 (transparency surface). If a vendor is added or its data scope changes, this page is updated in the same PR.