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+If you follow tech circles at all you've probably read something lately about how ad-blockers are going to destroy the web. Or more humorously to my mind, that they're "immoral". I think they're neither, but they are most definitely not going away.
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+Curiously, the browser add-on at the center of the controversy is Ghostery, which I've written about before not as an ad-blocker, which it really isn't, but as a privacy tool.
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+To my mind that pretty much nails the debate. If you see Ghostery as a tool for preserving your privacy and blocking attempts to track you, you'll be a supporter. If you see Ghostery as a tool to block ads you'll probably be opposed to it. 
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+It should be obvious, since I wrote a tutorial about how to install and use it, that I think Ghostery is great. I wouldn't use a browser without it. 
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+That said, I think that as a erstwhile publisher, or perhaps just as a participant in the open web, I have an obligation to explore all the ways in which I can make Ghostery unnecessary for you. 
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+So I sat down and looked over this site and my personal site (luxagraf.net) to see what I could do to protect my readers from being tracked. I serve all my sites over HTTPS, which I guess is good, though sometimes I worry it's already been compromised and therefore creates a false sense of security. 
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+And, while I don't set or use any cookies that track you, I was loading a tracker via Google Analytics. I don't have a particular problem with Google Analytics, but that's not the point. The point is that you might have a problem with it. All you've really agreed to in following a link here is to see what information I might have. You didn't also agree to let Google know what you're doing and by extension anyone Google wants to share that info with.
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+Not that Google is evil. But Google is beyond our control. But neither you nor I have any control over the data it collects. In the case of Analytics that means I can't, for example, delete all the data in it that's more than 6 months old. Nor do I have any control over what Google might do with all that data it's collected about what you do here. Yes it's supposedly anonymous data, but I truly hope that by now no one still believes any tracking data can truly be anonymous.
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+I decided that I could not in good conscience continue to expose my readers to a script that tracks them, stores information about them and at the same time advocate a tool like Ghostery. 
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+That kind of hypocrisy doesn't sit well with me. So I deleted the Google Analytics script from all my sites (I'd already made a similarly inspired decision to pull my mailing list out of MailChimp).
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+However, I found that I missed that analytics data. The web always feels a little like screaming into a black hole, the data we get from tools like Google Analytics makes it a little less so. I could see that people did indeed find my [tutorial on setting up Nginx on Debian]() useful or that almost no ever visits my [Ghostery tutorial](). It also helps see connections. Without it I would have no idea that several posts here are referenced on Stack Overflow or linked to from other articles around the web. 
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+Without analytics the web feels less friendly, less collaborative and more like futile shouting in a black hole. I didn't like it.
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+Now I could analyze my server logs with Webalizer, and I have set that up in the past, but let's face it, it's pretty fugly. Fortunately there's Piwik, a self-hosted analytics package that offers everything I liked about Google Analytics, but keeps my in charge and even lets me turn off cookie-based tracking. So I can see who's coming here, where they're coming from, what they seem to be enjoying **and that's it**. I have no idea where you go from here, no idea what you do next and, most importantly, neither does anyone else.