Who wants to be tracked?
I have switched one of my sites to cookieless analytics and it is bad for everybody.<p>I can't even say how many users this site has now. It could be the same user coming back over and over. Or many users. How would I know.<p>Yes, I could track a ton of stats about every pageview like user agent, screen resolution etc and then try to stitch it back together. Trying to figure out how many different users there are. But this type of "stitching together" would probably also count as PII.<p>I cannot test new features and see if it makes users happy so they come back more often.<p>I cannot see if the site has issues on some hardware, software, language. Because I wouldn't see if users affected come back less often.<p>I can't test if an introduction text at the beginning helps users discover important features. Because I can't make the connection between showing the text early on in the user journey and usage of features later on. Because I can't see a user journey.<p>This is a site I run for the enjoyment of me and the other users. Probably a few thousand a month. And I can say the site was much easier to develop with a normal cookie approach to tracking. I have gone the cookieless way for about a year now. And I can say with certainty that it would be a better site now if I kept the cookie approach. When the developer flies blind, that's bad for everybody.<p>I think for a commercial site, where a degradation of 10% in user experience can tank the business, there is no way around cookie tracking to figure out what works for users and what doesn't.<p>This is another reason, why European internet companies do not stand a snowball's chance in hell to compete with their US competitors.<p>European companies need to bug <i>all</i> users and beg for cookies. While US companies only need to do that with their European users.