I'm an advocate of privacy and naturally, your privacy is of utmost important to me.
I can't (and don't want to) identify you with site analytics.
Site analytics is an important part of running a website like this. When I propose a collaboration with brands, they need to know the amount of traffic my site gets and the demographics of my audiences to make a decision.
As I embark on a mission to degoogle my life, I swapped out Google Analytics for privacy-respecting Matomo Analytics in 2021.
What this gives me is full data ownership, meaning that the analytics data of my site is stored on my server, not Google's.
Matomo Analytics also lets me anonymize your IP data, meaning that I don't get to see your full IP and have no way to identifying you, not that I would ever want to.
Demographics of audiences are collected and presented to affiliates as set data.
Opt-out of website tracking
You can, of course, choose to opt out of even providing anonymized data here:
You may choose to prevent this website from aggregating and analyzing the actions you take here. Doing so will protect your privacy, but will also prevent the owner from learning from your actions and creating a better experience for you and other users.
This site has been degoogled.
As of February 2021, this website does not rely on Google's services such as Google Analytics, Google Adsense or Google Tag Manager. Google offers many advantages to website owners, but has it fair share of privacy concerns that I didn't think was worth the benefits.
Google Analytics have been swapped out for Matomo Analytics and Google's ads have been swapped out to “advertise” the two ways you can help support me and my mission, which are becoming a Patreon and buying a canister.
Affiliate Tracking
Another way that your activity on this site gets tracked onto a third-party platform is through affiliate platforms I work with. When you read a review and decide to buy a product, I get a small commission for the referral.
As you know, there are no ads running on this website. This is one of the few ways that help support the running of this website at no extra cost to my readers.
This is done when you click on a link within a review and the link would tell the affiliate platform that a user is coming from my website. There is no information exchanged that these affiliate platforms or I can use to identify who you are, besides the information you would normally input when you make an order on the merchant's site.
The information that gets transferred varies depending on the affiliate platform that the brands choose and include what was bought and how much was spent in order to calculate commissions.
Once again, it does not contain any personal information that can allow me to find out your identity. Nor do I want to. I have better things to do than to find out who bought five pairs of the Outlier Slim Dungarees in one order.
Third-party tracking
If you click on a link that takes you to another website, they might track you and I have no control over that. I also cannot control how third party services I use track you, although I am making every attempt to choose to right partners.
If you contact me, I have your information. Duh.
The other cases where I have your data is when you volunteer your private information like emailing me, messaging me on Reddit or Instagram, or leaving a comment on an article with your real information. These data are not collected in a list or anything like that but they will obviously be visible to me in the services you contact me by.
Contact
Got questions? You can reach me at hello [at] alexkwa [dot] com.