The modern web is a dangerous place. Third-party tracking poses a grave risk to user privacy, regarding both collecting and selling information. The risk is imposed both through legitimate channels β third-party harvesters selling user data β as well as illegitimate channels β third-party harvesters getting hacked. I believe that anyone who tracks usersβ behavior across the web does so without their consent and without providing any significant value. As such, It is ethically problematic to subject readers to this blatant risk for a nonexistent return.
This is not to say ethical people in the industry do not exist. There certainly are people who would never do anything intentional or nefarious with the data. However, it does not follow that bad actors do not exist. Even with good people at the helm, time, mergers, acquisitions, or bankruptcies can cause changes in ownership over sensitive data. I believe the potential for damage is both real and proven. It is a risk I am unwilling to take, for both myself and my readers.
In designing this website, I shifted my focus away from social integration and moved toward speed and readability. There are no tracking scripts, no analytic scripts, no ads, and nothing else to slow down the reading experience. The design puts the reader first: there are no intrusions, just the reader and the article.
This site is maintained in a very simple way. I edit the pages such as this one manually as HTML. Both this blog and the landing page are written in pure HTML and CSS. Occasionally, I use some JS to handle animation; never for tracking. Because there is no CMS, all of the files can be viewed using any browser inspector.
/css//js/blog/[post-name]/ where [post-name] is the URL slug for the post.Some pages have additional third-party code in them. Those affected are listed below.