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.

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.

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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.

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.

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. 

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).

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. 

Without analytics the web feels less friendly, less collaborative and more like futile shouting in a black hole. I didn't like it.

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.