What Do I Collect?
I use a JS snippet from Simple Analytics to collect page URL, referrer, UTM codes, time zone, scrolled percentage, user agent, device dimensions, and language. Simple Analytics doesn't track visitors with cookies, local storage, or browser fingerprinting. They even drop the IP address from every single request. You can find more information about all this here.
Why Use Analytics?
If you want to be a better writer, the most common advice is: know your audience. For a personal site like this one, that might mean knowing how many people are coming from Google vs from X, understanding what kinds of articles are the most popular, learning how long they spent reading an article, or seeing what countries visitors' requests come from. I can use that information to build a more engaging website. As far as sharing that data with third parties goes, the closest I get is when I test my friends' and family's patience by talking about my website traffic, which is basically never.
Why Have a Privacy Statement?
Maintaining your privacy online should be a normal topic of conversation, not something only crazy people and neckbeards talk about. You absolutely have the right to not care about your privacy online, and some days it seems like most people don't. But you should know what information you're volunteering and when you're volunteering it. In that spirit, I'm happy to explain what information I collect on this website and why.