After a year of neglect, I’m hoping to give this site more attention and posts once more. In the process, there’s some fixing up I need to do on the site, and I remembered that I set up Google Analytics on this site years ago – probably decades in fact. And yet, I’ve almost never touched the data. Not for lack of knowledge of the data or the tool. A big part of my job revolves around analytics, and google analytics in particular. It’s just not terribly interesting or useful for a personal site.
So I just decided to remove any tracking on the site for now. Maybe it’ll return someday— but I see no reason to collect data I’m unlikely to use. It’d be one thing if I were making design & content decisions from the insights. But I’m not. I realize the only reason I was collecting the data was that it may someday become useful. That seems like a pretty weak reason to me.
To be clear, there’s plenty of value in analytics when applied in a focused, purposeful way. But as the world embraces more privacy legislature and cultural norms, it’s worth questioning your motives. Are you collecting data for data’s sake?