How we count visits
We like to know which pages people read, so we can write and stock better. We do this without cookies, without trackers, and without following you around. Here is exactly how it works.
We do not use cookies or any device storage
konsensus.net sets no analytics cookies and writes nothing to your browser for measurement — no local storage, no fingerprinting scripts, no pixels. There is nothing to consent to, which is why you never see a cookie banner here.
What we count, and why
For each page view our own server records a small, coarse record: the page path, a rough referrer (where you arrived from), your country/region/city at city level, and device class (desktop or mobile). That is enough to see which essays and books people actually read. We do not build profiles and we never sell any of it.
How the visitor id works — a daily salted hash
To tell one visit from two without identifying anyone, we derive a throwaway id on our server. We take your IP address and browser user-agent, mix in a secret salt that we rotate every day, and run it through a one-way HMAC hash. Only the resulting id is stored — never your IP or user-agent.
id = HMAC( daily_secret_salt , your_IP + user_agent )
Because the salt changes at the start of every UTC day, the same person gets a different id tomorrow. The id cannot be reversed back into your IP, and it cannot be used to recognise you across days or across other sites. It exists only to roughly de-duplicate visits within a single day.
What we can never see
- Your IP address — it is hashed away and never written down.
- Your exact location — we keep only coarse city-level geography, never GPS coordinates or your raw IP.
- You over time — a new daily salt means yesterday's id and today's id can't be linked.
- You across the web — the id is unique to us and to one day; it means nothing anywhere else.
If our analytics store or the daily-salt key is ever unavailable, measurement simply fails closed — we count nothing rather than fall back to anything more revealing.
Why there is no consent banner
Cookie-consent banners exist because sites store identifiers on your device or share data with third-party trackers. We do neither. Our measurement is anonymous, first-party, and server-side, and rests on our legitimate interest in understanding which of our own pages are read — with no cookies and no personal data retained, there is nothing for you to consent to.
Third parties: none
No third-party analytics, advertising, or tracking scripts run on this site. The measurement described here is entirely our own. For the full picture of how we handle order and account data, see our privacy policy.