Episode Details

What's up everyone, today we have the pleasure of sitting down with Stéphane Hamel, Founder and Product Architect at MANTIS.

• (00:00) - Intro
• (01:07) - In This Episode
• (04:07) - How To Audit Which Trackers Are Firing On Your Website
• (07:00) - Why Nobody On Your Team Owns The Tags Firing On Your Site
• (11:22) - Why Your Consent Banner Does Not Match What Your Site Actually Does
• (16:45) - Does Server Side Tagging Actually Improve Privacy Governance
• (22:30) - Why Loading A Third Party Script Is Already A Privacy Risk
• (27:30) - What Happens When You File A Privacy Complaint In Canada
• (36:42) - Why AI Output Is Useless Without Domain Expertise
• (41:58) - Is AI Removing The Training Path For Junior Marketers
• (44:16) - When Vibe Coding Works And When It Falls Apart
• (47:56) - Why Marketing And IT Still Fight Over Who Maintains The Stack
• (52:02) - How To Decide Which Projects Deserve Your Energy

Summary: Stéphane Hamel built the first web analytics QA tool back in 2006, watched an ad blocker quietly borrow his logic, and spent the next 20 years learning that tracking got harder to see every year while the industry got better at documenting it. Now he's building MANTIS, a privacy observability platform that watches what a website actually does instead of what its policy claims. Along the way he audited his own credit bureau account after a breach, found trackers from companies that no longer exist sitting on the page displaying his credit file, and spent 2 years fighting to get them removed. He also coined the term vegetative AI, sold his house and furniture after one good vacation in the Rockies, and will tell you your consent banner is a receipt for a transaction nobody actually agreed to. Wait until you hear what a third party script collects before it fires a single tag.

About Stéphane Hamel

Stéphane Hamel is the founder and product architect of MANTIS, a privacy observability platform built to show what a website actually does at runtime rather than what its policy claims. He's spent 35 years across the full arc of digital analytics, building WASP in 2006 as the first web analytics quality assurance tool, publishing the Digital Analytics Maturity Model in 2009, and creating Da Vinci Tools, which was later acquired by Supermetrics.

He teaches MBA and EMBA students at Université Laval and advises privacy tech startups including Supermetrics, Caden, and Masthead Data. He's currently writing his first book on digital analytics concepts, and having been a victim of 2 of Canada's largest data breaches, he treats privacy as a trust problem rather than a legal one.

How To Audit Which Trackers Are Firing On Your Website

Open the network tab on your own company's homepage and count the outbound requests. Most marketers who try this land somewhere between 40 and 100 calls going to domains nobody on the current team approved. In 2006 that number was small enough to check by hand, and the only question worth asking was whether your analytics tag fired on the right page at the right moment.

That's the question Stéphane built WASP to answer. He was on the technical side back then, implementing trackers on client websites, and nobody in the room was talking about privacy or where any of this data ended up. The tool checked whether tags fired when they were supposed to and whether they collected the right information. It was quality assurance work, and it was the first tool of its kind.

That shift wasn't academic. Stéphane got hit by data leaks more than once, watched fraud follow, and spent 35 years consulting and teaching through every generation of the tracking stack. MANTIS is what came out the other side, and it asks a very different question than WASP did.

The new question has 3 parts:

What is actually loading on this website in terms of tracke