I ditched analytics quite early in this blog’s history when I realised that knowing about my website visitors had zero effect on anything in the real world. […] The other reason you might put analytics on your site is to know when someone links to your writing. Again, if the linker doesn't intend to tell you, then you're surveilling. You do not need to know every time your writing is mentioned. […] You’ll never know everything about your website, or its readers, and nor should you.
We block ads and trackers in our browsers because we don’t want to be watched. But as Leon points out, running analytics on your own site isn’t all that different — it’s still tracking. His reminder is a good one: we don’t need to know who visits, where they came from, or what they clicked. A personal site doesn’t have to be another place where people get surveilled.