This website is designed in a way that aims to avoid – or at least minimize – the transmission of your data to third parties unless you trigger it by intentional action.
The implementation is experimental and may change at any time, but for the time being can be summarized as follows:
- Anonymized website analytics are collected using the open-source Piwik software, running on the same server as the website. No analytics data is collected by third parties such as Google. Yes, you read that right: no Google Analytics listening in on you reading this website.
- Social media integration is limited to means where you have to first click on an element to express your intent to use a SNS service, otherwise neither Facebook, Twitter, Google nor any other third-party service should receive any information about you visiting this site.
- Embedding of third-party content is solved by either displaying a local preview of the content (e.g. in the case of video embeds: a still image hosted on this server) that is replaced with the real content when you click on it to watch the content. This way, the content hosting services only become aware of you seeing their content on this website if you really want to watch it (not already on page load, as is the default – ever wondered how Google can create such precise profiles of your interests?).
- JavaScript libraries and web fonts are hosted on the same server as this website, no external libraries are loaded from third-party services (avoiding the transmission of user data to such providers).
- Interactive maps are embedded making use of open-source OpenStreetMap data (OSM), rather than Google Maps. This ensures that maps can be used without -again – Google collecting usage information. However, since the display of embedded maps relies on so called map tiles (pre-rendered representations of the OSM data into visual images) and I do not have the resources to deploy my own tile server, the company MapQuest and the providers of the OSM server may be able to track who is assessing this website when loading pages with embedded maps.
Working on web-related things? Find out more about Privacy-Aware Design!