---
published: true
title: "Why I Stopped Tracking Traffic on My Blog"
permalink: /no-tracking/
description: "I was never happy about being tracked, why should I do that to others?"
category: personal
---

<!-- In this blog
1. background story
2. content purity not popularity
3. just keep building
4. practical reasons: performance, accessibility
 -->

Back in 2021, I deleted my Facebook account that had thousands of connections, and created a new one just for closest family members and friends.

Some time before that, I deleted an older Twitter account with hundreds of followers to create a [new one](https://twitter.com/ayoayco) that I wanted to be more focused.

It's quite liberating, but apparently those were just the beginning of my "cutting ties" with big tech.
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## The Social Media Business Model

I wasn't happy with companies earning from my personal information and communication; not to mention the destructive nature of their algorithms pushing misinformation just because those things generate more engagement.

Back in 2014, Facebook funded a research to test if they can [control users' emotions and modify their behavior](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jun/29/facebook-users-emotions-news-feeds).

It was no surprise then, when a couple of years later, millions of people voted for [a dictator who used Facebook](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-12-07/how-rodrigo-duterte-turned-facebook-into-a-weapon-with-a-little-help-from-facebook) to be the next president in my country.

Somebody profited from this and it has never been better for people ever since.

## Removing Tracking from This Blog

Well that was a bit heavy for a blog about removing analytics ain't it?

In a [recent commit](https://github.com/ayoayco/blog/commit/6e0b664a4fd51c3d9a7bbcb8f7b04c5967ff51c5) to this blog's code, I removed all tracking scripts -- 

 in this blog I want to write a bit about why I've
