The Creepy Feeling You Can't Shake
You search for a pair of running shoes. Once. And then they follow you around the internet for three weeks.
That's not a bug. Someone paid for that. Someone installed a tracking pixel, configured an audience segment, set a retargeting window, and decided that showing you the same shoes on a news article about climate change was a good use of technology.
We've normalized this so completely that most people don't even flinch anymore. But sit with it for a second. A website you visited once knows enough about you to find you on a completely different website, days later, and show you a personalized ad. That's an insane amount of infrastructure dedicated to selling sneakers.
The consent theater
Cookie banners were supposed to fix this. Give people a choice. The reality is a popup on every single website that nobody reads, everyone clicks "accept" to make go away, and the tracking continues exactly as before.
The few people who actually click "manage preferences" get rewarded with a screen full of toggles for companies they've never heard of. Forty-seven "partners" who apparently need access to your browsing data. For what? Nobody knows. Nobody checks.
The entire consent model assumes people have the time and expertise to make informed decisions about data processing on every website they visit. They don't. Of course they don't.
So the banners become wallpaper. And the data keeps flowing.
What actually gets collected
Most people have no idea how much a standard analytics setup captures. It's not just "someone visited my homepage."
A typical Google Analytics installation can tell you the visitor's approximate location, what device they're using (down to the model), their screen resolution, their browser and OS, what language their system is set to, how they got to your site, every page they visited and in what order, how long they stayed on each page, what they clicked, how far they scrolled, and whether they came back later.
Multiply that by every website with a tracking script. The aggregate picture of a person's online life, spread across analytics databases and ad networks, is remarkably detailed.
And most website owners never even look at 90% of this data. It just sits there, collected by default, because the tool they installed collects it by default.
A different question
What if you started from the other direction? Instead of "what can we collect?" you ask "what do we actually need?"
For most websites, the answer is short. How many people visited. What pages they looked at. Where they came from. Maybe what country they're in.
That's it. You don't need scroll depth on your about page. You don't need session recordings of people reading your blog. You just need to know if the thing you put on the internet is reaching anyone.
You can answer those questions without cookies, without personal data, without consent banners. The technology isn't complicated. The hard part was never technical. The hard part is resisting the urge to collect data just because you can.
That's why we built tinystat. One script tag, no cookies, no personal data, no consent banners. You get pageviews, top pages, referrers, and countries — the stuff you actually check — and nothing else. The tracking script is under 1KB and your dashboard loads in under a second.
A few other tools take this approach too, and that's a good thing. The more websites that stop collecting data they never use, the better the internet gets for everyone.
The running shoes will keep following someone around. That's not going away. But your website doesn't have to be part of it.