Privacy · Part 1
Websites without the cookie banner
This website has no cookie banner. If you hadn’t noticed: exactly. Nothing is missing. The page loads, the content is there, done.
That is not an oversight and not a dare against the law. It is a design decision — and the logic behind it is so simple that you wonder why it is applied so rarely.
The banner is a symptom
The consent dialog is not mandated anywhere as such. What is mandated is consent if you do things that require it: following people across websites, building profiles, handing data to ad networks.
The reverse also holds, and it is the interesting part: if you do none of that, you have nothing to ask. No tracking, no consent, no banner. The dialog everyone treats as a tedious obligation is in truth a confession: “This website does things that require your consent.”
What we still know — and how
Flying blind would be the wrong conclusion. A company that publishes needs to know what works — otherwise marketing is a game of luck. The only question is what you need to know for that. The answer is soberingly little:
- Which pages get read, and how often?
- Where do visitors come from — search engine, LinkedIn, newsletter?
- Which campaign brings visitors who stay?
None of these questions requires knowing who someone is. Counting anonymously is enough. That is exactly what a self-hosted, cookie-less analytics solution does here (Umami, on our own infrastructure): it counts views, referrers and campaigns — no cookie, no fingerprinting, no profile, no third party. Not a byte leaves the house.
What you deliberately give up: retargeting (“this person visited our pricing page, show them ads”), person-level funnels, the individual visitor as a data record. For an advertising giant, that would be ruin. For a company that sells through content and trust, it is: nothing. We haven’t missed it. What anonymous counting delivers in day-to-day practice is part 2 — with real numbers.
What the missing banner earns you
The first impression belongs to the content. The banner is the first UI element a new visitor sees on most websites — before the offering itself. A consent dialog as a business card. Here, the business card is the page itself.
The page is faster. Tracking scripts, tag managers and consent platforms are dead weight, often the heaviest on a page. Our counting script is a few kilobytes.
The promise is verifiable. For a Swiss company whose customers do not treat privacy as a footnote, the missing banner is an argument every visitor can verify for themselves — unlike any certificate or privacy policy. Open the developer tools: no advertising cookies, no third-party requests. The claim is right there in the source.
And legally? If your processing does not require consent, you don’t need consent — that holds under the Swiss data protection act (nDSG) just as it does under European regulation. What remains is the ordinary privacy policy, which transparently describes the anonymous counting. It is short. You may read that as a symptom, too.
The audit question for your own website
If your website carries a banner, an inventory is worth it — it takes an hour and sometimes hurts: which of the things your banner legitimizes do you actually use? An astonishing number of SME websites contain a tag manager full of tools somebody once wired in “for later”. Later never came. The banner stayed.
The alternative costs an afternoon: anonymous counting instead of tracking, self-hosted or with a European provider, banner gone, privacy policy shorter, page faster. It is one of those rare cases where the convenient, the fast, the cheap and the decent solution are all the same one.
This post is part 1 of the Privacy series. What the anonymous measurement looks like in practice and what an AI agent does with the numbers each morning follows on Tuesday in part 2.