You Are Not a Data Point: Why Undercroft Refuses to Track You

Every click. Every scroll. Every second you hesitate.

Someone is watching. They call it analytics, optimization, engagement. Let's be honest. It's tracking. On today's internet, simply visiting a page triggers a silent exchange where your presence is observed and your behavior recorded. You unknowingly trade your attention for content, but you never consented to be studied. You never asked to become a row in someone else's marketing database. At Undercroft Labs, we think that's wrong. Here's why.

What It Feels Like to Be Watched

Imagine walking into a bookstore. You pick up a book, and a man in the corner quietly scribbles notes. You move to another shelf. The man follows, still writing. You leave for another store, and he's there, watching. You never agreed to this. You just wanted to browse. This, sadly, is what browsing the modern web has become.

But it doesn't stop at a single page or session. Surveillance isn't just isolated, it's systemic, spanning devices, geographies, and generations. Children are tracked before they can comprehend what a cookie banner means. Adults are monitored through emails, browser tabs, smartwatches, and phones. While some of this collected data may be shallow or inaccurate, much of it isn't.

In Australia, journalist Will Ockenden released his own mobile phone metadata for public analysis. From this data alone, analysts reconstructed his daily life. They determined where he slept, worked, traveled, and whom he likely interacted with. Though the data carried no name, it didn't matter. The pattern of behavior told the story. This wasn't sophisticated surveillance software, but merely "harmless" metadata. Yet it painted an intimate portrait of a life. If this much can be revealed from one willing participant, what's happening silently to the unwilling?

Surveillance is Baked In

Surveillance isn't merely a marketing byproduct. It's woven into the very fabric of the web. Modern browsers, mobile operating systems, ad networks, and analytics platforms come designed with built-in hooks to monitor and extract behavior. Third-party cookies, browser fingerprinting, and real-time ad bidding weren't accidental features. They were purposefully built for surveillance. Even core protocols like DNS queries and IP-based routing can be weaponized to track patterns.

More troubling still, these tracking mechanisms hide behind layers of convenience. Development frameworks automatically load third-party scripts. Hosting platforms silently inject analytics. Email newsletters embed tracking pixels without asking. Surveillance has become the default state of web development, and avoiding it requires deliberate effort.

When surveillance forms the foundation rather than the exception, it's little wonder that so few sites dare to resist it.

The Advertising Trap

For most small businesses and independent creators, getting noticed means making a deal with the devil. The dominant platforms control the majority of online advertising and discovery. Their tools are easy to set up, highly effective, and nearly impossible to compete with. But they come at a cost. They quietly trade your users' privacy for your visibility.

Even well-intentioned business owners get swept into the system. They paste a tracking pixel into their site, unaware it monitors every pageview, scroll depth, and user journey. They install a remarketing tag to follow visitors across the web, dismissing it as "smart marketing." They sign up for ad platforms that promise anonymity but rely on fingerprinting and behavioral profiling.

The core issue isn't that businesses seek exposure. It's that the available tools require surveillance to function. The monopoly over advertising has turned ethical marketing into the exception rather than the rule. In a system built on exploiting user data, doing the right thing means rejecting the default path.

People Are Not Data Points

The real ethical breakdown isn't just technical. It's philosophical. When your behavior becomes a product, you cease being a person. You're no longer a visitor or reader but a data stream, a profile to be scored and sold. You become a bounce rate, a heatmap, a conversion probability. You're analyzed, nudged, retargeted, and measured. You are rarely respected. As Andrew Lewis once said, "If you're not paying for the product, you are the product."

Reducing people to numbers has another sinister effect: it erases emotional connection. It's easy to say 10,000 users dropped off at step three of a funnel. It's much harder to look someone in the eye and tell them they've been denied healthcare, opportunity, or justice because their data didn't fit a profitable pattern. Statistics can be ignored; humans cannot. A thousand data points may not move us, but one person suffering in an ER does. The more we rely on abstracted analytics, the easier it becomes to forget the people behind them.

What Undercroft Labs Does Instead

We don't use cookies, fingerprint devices, or track individuals across pages or sessions. At Undercroft Labs, we've chosen to use Plausible Analytics, a privacy-first alternative that doesn't use cookies, store IP addresses, or create personal identifiers.

We deliberately avoid surveillance tools, even at the cost of valuable insights and competitive advantage. While we host our site on mainstream platforms like DigitalOcean and Cloudflare, we neither collect nor utilize any of the data they process. Even if these platforms track users (and let's be honest, some do), we don't leverage or integrate that data into our systems.

This means forgoing granular dashboards and behavioral funnels. We can't optimize for "engagement" like other companies do. But we make this choice deliberately, every single day. We're committed to finding a different path forward, even when it puts us at a disadvantage. Because respecting your privacy isn't just a feature. It's fundamental to who we are.

The Tradeoff

It's incredibly difficult for a small business to thrive without the tools that now dominate digital marketing. We don't know where our visitors came from, what they clicked on, or how to follow them with ads, and that puts us at a measurable disadvantage. These insights fuel the growth of countless startups and agencies, creating entire industries around optimization and targeting. But we've chosen not to play that game. Because participating would mean compromising the very values we built Undercroft Labs on. So while others gain their edge by observing users, we forfeit that edge in service of something deeper: trust.

A Call to Ethical Development

The tools we build have consequences. They shape the way people experience the internet. Every interface, every line of code, carries weight. We believe software should respect people by default. At Undercroft Labs, you're not a conversion rate, a session, or an impression. You're a human being. And we write code as if you were sitting across the table from us.