Today we're opening early access to HeySignal, a server-side tracking gateway with one unusual property: it can tell whether an event was actually consented to, and it refuses the ones that weren't.
Published 21 July 2026 · The HeySignal team
That sentence sounds like table stakes. It isn't, and the story of why is the story of this product.
When Safari started capping cookies and ad blockers went mainstream, marketers lost their measurement. The industry's answer was server-side tagging: route events through a server you control, and the browser's restrictions stop applying to you.
It worked. A whole market grew around hosting those pipes, and some of the companies in it are very good at pipes. But somewhere in the move from browser to server, an inconvenient passenger got left on the platform: the question of whether the user said yes.
Look at how the popular tools actually handle consent. One market leader's own blog explains that server-side GTM has no consent mode, so you should wire up parameters and tick per-tag checkboxes. Another vendor sells a consent graph that monitors signals after the data already flowed, alongside a feature that restores marketing cookies the browser deliberately deleted. A third lets you pick between a mode that respects consent and a mode that loads tracking for everyone and pings ad platforms even on denial, with a DPA making lawfulness entirely your problem.
None of this is hidden. It's all in their documentation, stated plainly, and we quote it with sources on our comparison pages. The market's standard answer to consent is: that's your configuration, good luck.
Here's what "configure it yourself" means in practice. Consent arrives at these servers as a plain-text field or a URL parameter. Nothing verifies it. Nothing binds it to the event it rides with. If a tag is missing its checkbox, if a trigger has a typo, if a container was cloned from a template last March, data flows for every visitor, consented or not, silently, indefinitely.
The failure mode of the entire category is fail-open. And fail-open compliance isn't compliance, it's luck with a dashboard.
We come from the consent side of this industry, and we kept seeing the same thing: impeccable consent banners in the front, leaky containers in the back. The banner was legally meaningful theater unless the pipeline behind it obeyed. So we stopped waiting for the pipeline and built one that does.
Fail-open compliance isn't compliance, it's luck with a dashboard.
The core idea fits in a paragraph. Our SDK reads consent from your CMP and signs it into every event with HMAC-SHA256: event data, consent state, and timestamp, sealed together. A European edge node verifies that signature in constant time, rejects replays after five minutes, treats consent older than a day as no consent, and refuses anything that fails with a 403 and a typed reason. Only verified events continue.
From there, one event fans out to the platforms your visitor's consent allows. Consent is translated into each platform's own dialect automatically: Consent Mode v2 signals for Google, full event withholding for Meta because Meta has no GDPR consent parameter, limited-data-use flags for TikTok, and so on across ten destination types. Deduplication runs three layers deep. Failures retry, dead-letter, and replay. Everything is logged down to the block reason, and every processed event carries a consent proof ID.
Around the gate we built the things a modern tracking setup needs anyway: a first-party proxy so you can keep your GTM and GA4 exactly as they are while Google's domains are stripped out server-side; one-click ecommerce presets with shadow-mode migration that proves parity before you cut over; no-code tracking rules; a live debugger that shows every event's path through the pipeline.
And one thing nobody else has: Consent Gap analytics. Denied events are stripped of every identifier and aggregated under differential privacy, so you can finally see what "no" costs you in revenue, per destination, without tracking a single person who opted out. Consent stops being an invisible loss and becomes a number you can manage honestly.
All of it on European infrastructure, named: Bunny.net edge, OVHcloud databases in France and Frankfurt. No US cloud under any product, no US entity in the chain, and a public subprocessor list you can actually read. We think "EU region available" was always the wrong answer to the sovereignty question, and we built the right one.
Product announcements love roadmaps. Ours comes with a refusal list, because in this market what you decline to ship says more:
If a feature only works when nobody's looking, it doesn't work.
HeySignal is in early access. The gate, the destinations, the proxy, the ecommerce tooling and Consent Gap analytics are live; pricing lands at general availability, and early access partners help shape it. If you run tracking for an EU audience and you're tired of being the compliance layer of your own vendor's product, we'd like to show you a 403 doing its job.
Hey, by the way. Nice to meet you.
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