I just removed Google Analytics from this website
From now on this blog doesn't have GA tracking. I did not do this for GDPR compliance, rather I did it so that there would be no advertisers tracking my readers. It has bothered me for a while, but I didn't know if I could do it without knowing all that stuff analytics provides you.
I've lost potentially useful information, it ironically led me to sources who managed to explain why I should do this. This is how I located the purescript community just in time before they were getting really frustrated by the blogpost few days ago. There was an important detail I had to fill in.
The analytics is also displaying very interesting results right now.
I won't know how that one continues, it seems like it's building up momentum. I don't think this has happened before.
I'll likely try to setup some kind of tracking later for the reason that it's useful for finding what people discuss and which kind of articles are popular, but I will ensure it maintains privacy. Maybe I'll use this piece by Andrew Healey once I see what people think of it, and maybe I'll look at it myself as well. It's perhaps a pure coincidence that he dropped this into lobte.rs recently?
This also catched my eye: "Unacceptable, where is my privacy?" It's a comprehensive study of accidental triggers of smart speakers. Made by Lea Schönherr, Maximilian Golla, Thorsten Eisenhofer, Jan Wiele, Dorothea Kolossa, and Thorsten Holz in Ruhr University Bochum & Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy.
So what did replace GA in my arsenal? The possibility to have peer-to-peer discussion without the usual exhaustion that I've associated with meeting and discussing with people before. It requires that I provide the same experience back, of course.
2020-08-12: I heard from my sister that people have tools on their browsers to block tracking cookies, and what would be required is only a mention on the website of advertising tracking present.
I'm going to think over this a bit, though I am likely still going to keep it this way for a while now. There's maybe a more important message here, that is why did I fuss over the user traffic in the first place? I feel it is a lot less important to me now.