Websites should be public service announcements, not surveillance tools. This site uses analytics but no spyware.

This site collects aggregate data about its visitors but not about you or your visits in particular.

There are very large corporations that not only index the web but also provide analytics about how people interact with the web. Names like Google and Microsoft come to mind. By installing a line or two of code at the very top of a website, these companies provide sophisticated analytics platforms and tools that provide information to website owners. This information incudes:

• Number of users on a site
• How often they spend on the site
• How many and what pages are visited
• The number of pages viewed
• Where visitors are coming from

This information can be useful to website owners in helping them understand whether their content is reaching the most relevant audiences. About 85% of all websites use Google Analytics, which places a cookie on your computer, allowing them to not only follow you around the website, but potentially follow you around the web. Google and other culprits of contemporary surveillance capitalism, including our social media frenz at Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, etc. know more about us than we ourselves know.

Anyway, this website use an independent, privacy-first, Canada-based analytics tool called Fathom that does collect the kinds of information above but does not place a cookie on your computer and therefore does not follow you around the web. Fathom is GDPR compliant, it does not sell or resell data, and it doesn’t taste dirty.

If you’re interested, the code used for Fathom is lightweight and looks like this:

<script src="https://cdn.usefathom.com/script.js" data-site="EETPEPWS" defer></script>

To be honest, I barely look at site analytics. It’s kind of in bad taste. But also fascinating! Like who knew I had so many fans in Russia! If you’re interested in seeing what an actual Fathom Analytics dashboard looks like, have a gander.