A website with no cookies

 July 19, 2020

Today I did a big update to this website. The goal of today’s update is the removal of Disqus. I have decided to remove Disqus more than a year ago, with the decision to remove all cookies from this website. The plan was to remove both Google Analytics and Disqus since those were the only two reasons this website was distributing cookies. I removed Google Analytics in June 2019, and now I’ve removed Disqus, so this goal has now been achieved.

From a technical standpoint, I substituted Google Analytics with kelfa and Disqus with swlcs, both software created by me with this specific goal. I’ll blog about them and how to use them in the future so that other people can benefit from them.

Now the only pieces of information that this website will only collect are the ones in AWS CloudFront logs. Also, with this change, there are very few services that you might hit by navigating this website, to be more precise:

• AWS Route 53: the authoritative DNS server for the domain. In general, you should not contact it directly, but it might be able to collect some data about you in specific edge cases
• AWS CloudFront: the CDN distributing the website contents. This service is the only one that you will for sure contact, and that could potentially track the website users
• AWS Lambda: the function hosting used for handling the creation of comments. Your browser will only invoke a Lambda function if you decide to post a comment. To read the comments, no Lambda is involved. As you can see, the amount of services that can sniff your information is now minimal and are all from the same service (AWS).

I think that all website owners should analyze which services can track their users and reduce the list only to include the services that are beneficial to the user. Internet privacy starts with the website owner’s responsibility. Internet privacy starts with our decisions!