Basti's Scratchpad on the Internet
25 May 2018

GDPR Compliance

Personal email is dead. The signal-to-noise ratio of my personal email account has been deeply negative for years. But the last few days have been especially riveting, with a torrent of GDPR-compliance emails from just about every company that has ever gotten their hands on my email address. Anecdotally, if spam makes up about 90% of all email traffic, and the last few days have seen a ten-fold increase in traffic due to GDPR emails, we might even have "defeated spam" for a few days! Yay internet!

But sadly, I can't add to the signal-to-noise ratio, because this website does not collect any email addresses. And even more sadly, it doesn't even collect IP addresses, or use any kind of analytics at all. Sorry about that. I honestly do not know how many people read my stuff, and I can not rank my blog posts by their popularity. And I like it that way. It prevents me from getting on any kind of treadmill to please any kind of imagined audience.

That is… with one exception: Comments on this website are powered by Disqus, and I'm sure Disqus collects all kinds of data about all kinds of things. That's why comments are now hidden behind a "Load Disqus Comments" button. I promise you that no foreign Javascript is executed unless you press that button1. And honestly, GDPR didn't even have anything to do with that. I just didn't want any foreign JavaScript.

Footnotes:

1

Unless katex.min.js somehow is loading external javascript…

Tags: privacy blog
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