(No) Data Collected
I don’t use any analytics on this site. I don’t care where people come from to visit. Heck, I don’t worry about how many people come here. I write here for my own enjoyment — any interaction that follows from that is a bonus.
Speaking of interactions, I’ve disabled comments across the site and replaced them with a link to email me any comments you may have. There are several reasons why I did this:
- It’s more work for me to do on the site apart from writing and tinkering with the site design.
- Most of the comments are/were spam. They’re all generic boilerplate stuff, whoever sends them doesn’t read this site, they scan the web for any web page that’ll take comments and fire away.
- Comment forms are a pain in the posterior, regardless of how they’re implemented. If it’s locally hosted, it’s more work for me. (See point 1 above.) I don’t trust any external service to handle this stuff well and not misuse the information for their own ends. I particularly don’t trust any social network, since they definitely use that data for their own purposes.
- Email Just Works. Plus I find it leads to much more interesting conversation if it’s just between us. 🙂
Any emails will be cherished, but rest assured I’ve no intention of giving your address or other details to anyone else. I hate spam as much as you do and feel no desire to feed any of those operations.
No Tracking
I avoid embedding content on my site — I’m acutely aware that all that stuff is tracked to Hell and back. All images and other media are hosted locally. Additionally, I don’t use any affiliate programmes and remove tracking data from links that I include on posts and pages.
Aside from the privacy implications, I prefer to keep this site lean and fast. I’ve seen how bad some places on the web can be without ad-blocking and tracker-blocking, and have no desire to inflict that kind of pain on you, dear reader.