It’s harder than you think to avoid spying on people…
When I started Complexical, I set some pretty firm rules, and one of those was that I refuse to track people. Whether you’re a customer or a research participant, a newsletter subscriber or just casually scrolling the blog — we will not track your activity in any sneaky ways.
But the modern internet is built around trackers. Cookies, tracking pixels, link trackers. They’re everywhere. Even if you don’t choose to install extra analytics tools (such as analytics by Google or Facebook), sometimes standard web tools try to ‘helpfully’ give you them for free.
As a user, this often manifests in your every page view and every click being meticulously recorded, across databases owned by multiple services and data brokers. Tracking pixels on websites record which pages you visit, and in what order, while similar pixels in emails send back information on when you opened a specific email, and how many times. Trackers embedded in links redirect you via a data-gathering service before sending you on to the page you were trying to access. Cookies store information on your own devices, some of which is useful to you (keeping you logged in to a site) and some of which is pure spyware (allowing companies to follow your activity between different sites).
Consider the recent scandal where mental health charities, using Facebook’s tracking pixels, were sending information to Facebook on when an individual was looking at pages relating to specific mental health concerns, often linking that information back to their personal Facebook account. As a human, you can easily see why this is problematic. However, these algorithms haven’t been designed with any way to account for when web browsing might be sensitive.
As a company owner, trying to actively avoid doing this kind of tracking these days requires jumping through a surprising number of hoops.
Turning off web stats
Take WordPress, which we used to build this site.
We chose not to add any trackers, or even the popular social media “share” buttons, as these generally contain hidden trackers too. You’ll also notice there’s no cookie banner or pop-up here, and that’s because we’re not setting any cookies from this website (unless you log in, which is an option only available to staff), and certainly no third-party or advertising cookies.
But WordPress does still have one tracking pixel of its own built in, via the Jetpack extension.
Now, Jetpack comes with some useful stuff, like brute force protection (for security) and page caches (to improve site loading speed), so I didn’t want to be forced to uninstall the whole thing. But they don’t make it easy to just turn off the tracker! In fact, the button to do so isn’t even available within the standard settings menu: you have to go to a completely different page in order to disable the ‘Stats’ module:
https://[yoursite.com]/wp-admin/admin.php?page=jetpack_modulesI found this via Jetpack help, but the page itself isn’t linked from within the WordPress dashboard, so you have to go out of your way to look for it.
If you want to find out what your website is currently doing in terms of trackers, try Blacklight or access your site using the DuckDuckGo app. That will show you what privacy-conscious visitors will be seeing when they check you out.
Sending email without spying on recipients
Then there’s email.
Some of the big newsletter providers do allow you to turn off analytics (though many do not), but with conditions — for example, Mailchimp allows you to not see the tracking info, but if you’re on a free plan or you’re new to their services, they insist on still tracking your users themselves. While I understand they’re doing it to protect their service against spammers, I’m still not okay with this.
SendStack seems to be the most privacy-focused newsletter provider out there right now, so we’re experimenting with their service. Unfortunately, as they’ve only launched quite recently, they don’t yet have all the features we need (notably, alt text for accessibility is missing, although we’ve checked and made sure it’s on their to-do list). But I’m hoping to see them grow into a successful provider in this space.
I’ve also noticed that some other business systems with integrated email (think CRMs, marketing funnels, and automation systems) also include trackers in the emails they send on behalf of your business. Many of these don’t tell you they’re doing it, except insofar as they provide an analytics service, and often don’t give you a way to switch it off. I’m now very careful to check out all services myself, before I allow them to send emails out to anyone else.
What about social media?
We can’t stop other sites, such as popular socials, from tracking people. It’s kind of their business model.
It was a genuinely tough decision whether to use these sites. We don’t want to tacitly normalise practices we wouldn’t use ourselves. But as a new company, we came to the pragmatic decision that without the visibility given by social engagement we probably wouldn’t survive long enough to uphold our values in other areas.
Our practical compromise is to encourage traffic from socials to our own site, and not the other way around. People have already made the individual decision whether or not to be on social media, and if they’re there, we can use that to try and reach them. But we would never try to actively push people towards social media if it’s not their thing (whether for privacy or other reasons) — so we won’t, for example, run promotions or contests that ask people to follow us on specific platforms.
We also, as noted above, flat out refuse to incorporate social trackers into our own pages, as we don’t think it’s any business of theirs (or ours) which parts of our site you choose to read.
Towards a more private internet
Those are some of the ways we’ve looked at tracking within Complexical, and represent the first steps we’re taking to work towards a fairer, less invasive internet. As we make further business decisions, you can be sure that user privacy is going to be high on our list of considerations every time — so watch this space for updates.
