The cookie warning notice is really annoying, specially when you don’t have other choice than accepting them to read a website. Moreover, if you value privacy what is even more annoying is to be tracked everywhere you go on the Internet.
At the time of this writing, our website does not store any cookies at all and it does not have any tracking pixel or web beacon. Every single resource that your browser is loading from our website is stored in our own server. There are no other requests going to third party domains that might track you. This is the only way we can guarantee that our website respects visitors' privacy. We carefully avoid embedded videos, as well as loading images and other static files such us JavaScript, css or fonts from third party servers.
Because we value privacy and because there is no point in retargeting here. We don’t sell books, electronics or any other material product. We don’t produce goods for the masses so there is no point in chasing our visitors to remind them of us. We offer tailor-made services. We join forces with our collaborators to help them move forward, typically spending six months or more together. The marketing we like to do is organic. It’s by creating quality content that we want to be remembered and let you know that we are here to help. Crafting articles, giving talks, running workshops, building open source tools… As we don’t want/need to do retargeting, we don’t want others to do so through our site, this is why we carefully avoid loading files from other servers. The reason we can avoid absolutely all cookies is that there is no “login” section in our website, it’s just a plain static set of pages generated with Hugo. If we had some kind of intranet for registered users, then we would be forced to use cookies for them.
Everytime we release a new article or make changes to the website, we have to explicitly search for potential links pointing out of our website. This means more work and more storage in our server. When a new version of a JavaScript library or CSS is released, we have to update it manually to keep it in our server. Your privacy is worth our effort.
As far as we know, SEO would be better if we embedded videos from our YouTube channel into our website and perhaps if we added Google Analytics. Again, we value SEO but we prefer to get organic traffic because of the quality of our contents and not because some kind of black magic is operating.
We have been doing this for more than six months and we are not aware of any problems. Google Search Console still works and give us relevant information so as to what articles are hit the most. We could also register stats in our server, without the need for cookies to know better who visit us in terms of device type, operating system, browser, country… but for now we don’t really find any value in this kind of metrics.
On December 17, Nat Friedman published an article on Github’s blog about their cookie policy.
Some sites are forced to use cookies, their own cookies in order to manage user sessions. However many others don’t actually need them at all. And many of them are not even aware they are loading files from other servers. Modern browsers are implementing privacy warnings to let you know about the website you are visiting, Firefox and Brave are specially concerned about privacy. Safari has also implemented new privacy options. I personally like to use different browsers for different accounts or purposes. Some colleagues like to use DuckDuckGo or Ecosia rather than Google to avoid confirmation bias in searches as well as privacy. You could alternate the use of Bing and other search engines in order to make it a bit harder for a single company to track you.
We might change our cookie policy in the future if new features are required and so cookies are needed, but for now, it’s our pleasure to deliver a website that is not bothering you with any cookie policy warning and it’s not tracking you at all. Enjoy our blog dear visitor.
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