I don’t use cookies on this website. None. Zero.
I also don’t save any server or database logs about site visits. I have chosen not to track you or your use of this site. Crazy, right!
Want to know why?
Because people hate having their privacy violated. That is the underlying reason why governments, trade-groups, and standards organizations around the world have created a bunch of privacy consent rules with bewildering acronyms like CCPA, ePrivacy, GDPR, IAB TCF 2.0, DoNotTrack, TPE, TCS, and DAA.
Part of the work I do for clients is navigating the constantly shifting sands of business and software technology. My clients depend on me to be aware of licensing, compliance, security, and performance impact as we evaluate and implement new technologies and components to build software products.
Maintaining compliance with the continually changing global privacy landscape is daunting, and (let’s face it) exhausting. An entire category of privacy-compliance businesses is thriving by helping you—the website owner—mitigate the risk of non-compliance. If your business needs to collect customer data or share it with third parties, you should be aware of your obligations and have a way to manage policies, notices, disclosures, and to collect valid user consent. This stuff is not your core business, and believe me—you want to outsource it. I have worked with several companies that specialize in this area, and if you need it, I can help you engage with them successfully without spending a fortune. (Hint: don’t start by asking your lawyer to deal with these issues. Instead, use a company that tracks the always changing requirements and provides software tools you can directly embed into your web-application or mobile app.)
Or you can side-step the problem entirely.
That is what I have decided to do on this website. By not making any attempt to track you, I give up having analytics about who uses this site and how often. I also lose the ability to provide a user-customized data-driven experience. I even miss out on the ability to directly determine which articles are popular and which are not. (Although I can measure popularity indirectly by searching the internet for link-backs, quotes, or by counting inbound emails or leads generated.) If you are a marketing, social media, or product person, you are probably cringing at my loss of “essential” customer information. But—make no mistake—this IS a commercial website, and I AM trying to sell you my services. (And it’s working, see what my clients say.) I’d like very much for you to hire me to scale and optimize your outsourced software development team, or to advise your early-stage software startup.
But I don’t need to violate your privacy to do that.
When you are creating a software product, there are a remarkable number of high-level decisions that you need to make. Some decisions allow you to bypass a mountain of complexity entirely. Do you really, truly need that database, or can this application be built as a static site using external APIs? Is all that JavaScript essential? Does your SaaS-app need a microservices-based architecture for your 3-person startup? What value do you get from tracking your customer’s every move? What value do you get if you explicitly do not track your customers? Do we need to use cookies?
When you evaluate carefully, the answers may surprise you, simplify your application, reduce your risk profile, and help you send the right message to your customers.
(Disclaimer before I get any angry “hypocrisy” emails: I do depend on third-party services to make parts of this website function. For example, I’m using partners to deliver streaming videos (Loom) and provide specialized fonts (Google Fonts, Font Awesome) on this website. I have no access to or control over any cookies that may be used by these third-party partners.)
(No) Cookie Policy was last changed on January 13, 2023, by Michael Marmor.
See a mistake or typo above? Want to chat about this policy or my opinions? I’m not a big fan of comment hosting services, but I would still love to hear from you, so give me a shout!
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