I’ve been reading a lot about digital privacy lately. I’ve been thinking about ways to keep my data more secure from the NSA, from corporations, from my ISP, etc. And then I realized that I use services on my website that aren’t privacy-friendly. So I made a couple of updates to this website today.
First, no more Google Analytics. It’s great to see which of my posts are most popular, where my visitors are from geographically, what sites are linking to my site… But I don’t really need that information. And I certainly don’t need it bad enough to warrant taking information about my site’s visitors and sending it off to Google. So no more Google Analytics. If I decide in the future that I need analytics, I’ll find a tool that I install on my server and can keep secure from others. But for now at least, I’m simply not going to collect analytics data.
The second change was to drop Disqus comments. Disqus was the most offending service on my site. Not only did it flag Privacy Badger when I visited my own site, but when I visited disqus.com directly, Privacy Badger blocked the entire site! All I got was a blank page until I temporarily disabled Privacy Badger. I looked back over the past couple of years, and there was roughly one comment per month. (Most of the discussion happens via social media.) So I decided to keep webmentions ― which come from public sources on users’ own platforms ― and include a note at the bottom of each post with ways readers can contact me if they like.
That said, I still feel somewhat ambivalent about webmentions. While some come from services where users expect their comments to show up here, many of them are posted by users without knowing that their platform (mainly Twitter and Facebook) supports webmentions and that their comments are ending up on my site. The comments are public, but not necessarily intended to be preserved here. So I’m still thinking about that.
With that caveat about webmentions, I feel good about diminishing the amount of my readers’ private data I’m sending to third parties. What do you all think? Send me a webmention! :p