A website without a consent banner
“We want to know how many people come to our website. But will we have to have that annoying banner everyone has to click away?”
I hear those two together with almost every new website. The banner bothers the client more than the number itself — after all, just about everyone has one these days.
But hidden in that question is an assumption that doesn’t hold: that measuring and tracking are one and the same thing. The banner appears on websites because of the second one — because the site makes a note of the visitor and recognizes them the second time around too: that they came from a particular ad, say, or that they were looking at washing machines. But the number “how many people read the blog today” doesn’t need that kind of memory at all.
A line that recognizes nobody
This site does it like this: whenever someone opens a public page, one line is added to a log. It holds the time, the page address, and where the visitor came from — just the domain, not the full address or what they searched for. And one category: whether it was a human, a search engine, monitoring, or some other bot. Bots aren’t thrown away, they get counted too — it’s quite useful to know whether Google has noticed the page at all.
What isn’t in that line is more interesting than what is. There’s nothing in it that would show that two lines belong to the same person. No IP address, no browser fingerprint, no cookie — this measurement stores nothing at all in the browser. So this site has nothing to get anyone’s consent for, because there’s nobody to recognize later.
The price is a rougher number
Being honest about it means saying what gets lost, too. If someone opens the same page three times, that’s three lines, not one visitor. Recognizing that it’s still the same person would mean exactly what isn’t supposed to be stored — and that’s the whole bargain. The number that comes out of it is rougher than what Google Analytics shows. But it answers the question the whole thing is done for: is anyone reading this at all?
What’s more, the data stays where it was created — on the site’s own server, not sent off to some analytics service. It’s the same rule I’ve written about here regarding AI: what isn’t supposed to leave, doesn’t. Not a single third-party script runs on the site for the browser to download and run. And old lines delete themselves after a while — after some 400 days, they’re gone. Exactly what gets counted and why is described on the page What this site knows about you.
What the client gets out of it
There was nothing to consent to on this site — and I still have the numbers the whole thing was built for. If you want the same on your website, it means one less banner to click away, one less third-party script, and none of your visitors’ data going off somewhere you can’t see. There’s nothing to ask for, so nobody asks.