StatCounter also removed with its tracking cookies – 30 Sep 2020

Both StatCounter and the Twitter integration (it displayed my latest Tweets and allowed a click to follow) were removed from my site. These were potentially two external sites which could track visitors across my site as well as elsewhere.

Right now I have instead installed my own self-hosted version on Matomo (ex-Piwik) stats analyzer. It does give me a view of where visitors are coming from (city), how they found my site, and what pages they are visiting, as well as what is being searched for on my site. The IP addresses are anonymised by 2 bytes so I am not seeing actual user IP addresses and the cookie is only created for the current session and then discarded. So there is no tracking across multiple visits and not to anywhere else on the web. The site also respects “Do Not Track” settings on browsers.

There is still no advertising on the site nor is any data given or sold to any third party. I am just looking at summary data to help inform me what is popular on the site.