secluded/content/posts/privacy-respecting-analytics.md

---
title: "Privacy-respecting analytics"
date: 2023-03-06T12:23:00-05:00
cover: ./cover.png
categories: ["Technology"]
tags: ["Privacy", "Web"]
draft: false
toc: false
---

For a long time, I was so vehemently opposed to analytics on personal websites
that I condemned people using privacy-respecting systems like [Plausible] on
their blog, shouting about mUh PrIvAcY and saying that these platforms only
boosted the bloggers' ego and they would end up writing for their readers rather
than personal enjoyment. I'm realising that I was kinda dumb 🤔

[Plausible]: https://plausible.io/

One of my clients recently asked me to add analytics to the website I created
for them. I said yes and asked whether they had a preference as to which
analytics system. They said no, they just wanted to see how many people were
using the website and whether they were actually looking at the menu and store
pages. I decided to set them up with [Umami] because it has a very simple UI,
it's not affiliated with Big Tech™ companies, [it's GDPR-compliant,](umami-gdpr)
and the script is only 2 KBs.

[Umami]: https://umami.is/
[umami-gdpr]: https://umami.is/docs/faq

Analytics on a business's website is a no-brainer. Business websites should be
pleasant, ergonomic, and useful for their customers and analytics do assist with
that goal. But what about on personal websites? The big reason Google Analytics
is so often condemned is because of Google; you bet your ass they're aggregating
all the data they harvest from their collective properties and associating that
information with your visitors' profiles (yes, even if they don't have a Google
account) to improve their advertising engine. Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, etc. do
exactly the same thing with all of their like/share buttons. They're ingesting
as much data as they can to feed their ad systems and I don't want to further
their mass surveillance of the internet.

The privacy issues with analytics primarily apply to the big providers that
aggregate everything across their customers' properties in order to surveil as
many people as possible. Systems like Umami are different. The minimal data
that's collected is anonymised and stays in-house, on your (preferrably)
self-hosted server. When you really give it some thought, there's nothing
inherently wrong with knowing how many visitors your site has, what pages
they're viewing, and what website they came from.

I enabled Umami on my website shortly after coming to this realisation and [made
the analytics page public.][public]

[public]: https://umami.secluded.site/share/7PNXq2e8/Secluded.Site

The referrers section is fascinating when you bump the period from "Today" to
"All time". There are some unusual search engines, a couple onion addresses,
another of my own websites [(scratchanitch.dev)][sai], and even some personal
ones. After seeing other individuals link to my website, I had the idea to use
GitHub's [Code Search] feature to poke around and see [where else it was
mentioned.][cs-results]

[sai]: https://scratchanitch.dev/
[Code Search]: https://github.com/features/code-search/
[cs-results]: https://github.com/search?q=%22secluded.site%22&type=code

A suprising number of people seem to be referencing my _[Vim as a Markdown
Editor][vme]_ post. I haven't thought about that post since I wrote it, much
less updated it. Taking a look at Umami indicates that it's by far my most
popular one. Maybe I should have another look at it and see if there's anything
that needs to be improved ...

[vme]: https://secluded.site/vim-as-a-markdown-editor/

Knowing that there are people visiting my site and that some of the things I've
written are useful is, frankly, quite encouraging. That's why I'm writing this
post. That's part of what inspired my next one and it's why I intend to start
writing more. I do enjoy writing, but the idea of tossing something I've spent
hours on into the void of the internet isn't exactly motivating.

As long as it isn't causing problems, I don't believe "boosting the blogger's
ego" is inherently bad. Encouragement can be quite good 🙂