Privacy

Analytics are used to give me high level overview on what articles are being read and a rough idea where that traffic originates from and on what sort of devices. This lets me optimise content and site design.

For analytics I’ve adopted a self-hosted instance of Plausible. Key factors for choosing this product was that it was light weight for end users (very small script compared to other options), the focus on privacy and the ability to self host. The product is open source so the developers claims can be verified. I strongly encourage anyone interested to look at https://plausible.io, especially the statements on privacy.

The page requested is recorded. Subsequent requests from the same IP are treated as a single visitor, but as per the section bellow I won’t actually know if this is a single or multiple people. The IP address is used to identify an approximate location of the request, roughly to a city level. Browser, OS and display class (mobile / desktop) are captured too.

From December 2023 I made a conscious decision to not track individual movement through the site, and moved away from Google Analytics as a result. As I do not sell anything, including ads, I can get by on aggregate data.

Yes, the data is anonymous.

Unlike Google Analytics and other products which place a cookie on your PC that can be used to track your individual browser session across page visits and sessions, Plausible uses an IP based request to detect a request. This method of detecting usage is less accurate than using a cookie due to the fact that the public IP that the site see’s will in many, if not most cases, be one that is potentially shared across multiple users (possibly hundreds for businesses, universities, etc). Some ISP’s also associate an IP across multiple households by applying NAT to users service. Ultimately even when there is a single user of an IP, I have no way to distinguish this from an IP shared across multiple people.

The sum of this is I can see that someone accessed my site from a city, but as soon as there’s more than one request from an IP I won’t know if those requests originate from one or more people.

No. Data is only accessible to me only and is not provided to anyone.

I fully respect any individual that does not want to be tracked. If you’d like to avoid your browsing contributing to the aggregate reporting, feel free to block the ‘analytics’ subdomain (https://analytics.courtenay.net).