June 8, 2026 // bogs // essay

This Website Does Not Use Cookies

There is no cookie banner on this site. No consent dialog. No popup asking you to accept forty-seven categories of tracking before you are allowed to read an essay. That is not an oversight. It is a choice.

The Banner Problem

Cookie banners are one of the great failures of modern web regulation. The intent was good: tell people when they are being tracked, and give them a way to say no. In practice, every website now greets you with a legal document disguised as a modal. Most people click "Accept All" because the alternative is navigating a twelve-tab preference center designed by someone who clearly did not want you to say no. The banners do not protect anyone. They just add friction to the experience of being surveilled.

The real solution is not a better banner. It is not needing one in the first place.

What Plausible Does Differently

This site uses Plausible for analytics. Plausible is interesting because of what it does not do. It does not set cookies. It does not use localStorage. It does not fingerprint your browser. It does not build a profile across sessions. It does not follow you around the internet. It counts page views without identifying the person viewing the page.

How? Instead of assigning you a persistent identifier, Plausible generates a daily hash from your IP address and User-Agent string. That hash rotates every twenty-four hours and is never stored. There is no way to reconstruct who visited what, or to connect Tuesday's visitor to Wednesday's. The data that comes out the other end is aggregate: which pages were popular, which countries visitors came from, which referrers sent traffic. Useful information. Not surveillance. Just statistics.

Why This Matters Legally

Under GDPR, you need consent before storing or reading data on a visitor's device. Cookies require consent. Fingerprinting requires consent. Anything that identifies a person across sessions requires consent. Plausible does none of these things. No data is stored on your device. No individual is identified. No consent is needed.

This is not a legal grey area. The EU's own data protection authorities have confirmed that cookieless, non-identifying analytics do not require a consent banner. If you do not track people, you do not need to ask permission to track people. It really is that simple.

What I Get to See

The Plausible dashboard tells me which pages get read, where traffic comes from, and roughly which part of the world the reader is in. It does not tell me who you are. It does not tell me what you did before you got here. It does not sell that data to anyone. I know what is popular. I do not know who is reading it. That is the right trade-off.

The Point

A personal website should not feel like it is interrogating you. You should be able to read something without first negotiating the terms under which you are allowed to be observed. This site is static HTML, a few CSS files, and one lightweight analytics script that respects the fact that you are a person, not a data point.

No cookies. No banners. No tracking. Just pages.