I am working on a major upgrade for the Community Color sites.
I am developing the code on yintercept.com.
I added a code viewer so that I can claim the site is open source.
I decided to log statistics for the site in a SQLite Database.
When writing the "privacy policy" I decided to show the information that the site has collected.
I did this to emphasize that the data collected by small sites like mine is basically harmless.
The reason I track data is to answer questions about the site. For example, I want to know how many people visit a page and the amount of resources consumed by a page.
About seventy percent of the traffic on the web is robots and webcrawlers. I want to know what the robots are doing.
I want to be able to defend the site against DDOS attacks.
I learned the painful lesson that one cannot offer interactive features to the public, like a guestbook, without attracting a great deal of spam.
I require a log in for interactive features. I use a system of User IDs and Sessions to track usage. Interactive sites require an id, otherwise they can't respond to the things that you are doing.
The privacy concerns we face on the Internet are not the result of cookies or web owners monitoring their sites. The problem is with huge corporations (and governments) seeking to dominate the Internet by tracking individual activity in minute details.
Unfortunately, the self declare privacy rights activists use methods that make life very difficult for small sites.
The fact that small sites use cookies to provide interactive features is not a problem. The big sites that monitor activity can do so without cookies.
I hope that my showing the details I track on the site to the public, people will learn that independent web sites are not a threat, but it will probably backfire.
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