# No Comment

If you are one who is given to paying attention to the comings and goings of this blog, you may notice that there is no comment section anymore. There are two reasons for this.

First, I didn't have my own server side to manage the submission of comments. I had a form that called a service which then forwarded an email to me with the contents in the body, and I would manually curate those comments. Nobody ever submitted any comments, but the fact is that using a third party service to forward stuff meant that I didn't have eyes on that data at all times. Who knows what that service could do with that data, be it farming email addresses, or mining the comments for nuggets it could use for personalized ads or whatever. At any rate, I didn't control it, I couldn't guarantee the integrity of the service, and so I didn't want anything to do with it.

Second, and equally important, as much as I would love to have engagement, have rousing conversations happening in the margins of content that I've created, mostly the idea of holding onto things that other people have created makes me uncomfortable. I don't want to be responsible for protecting someone else's data, their identity. I've seen plenty of cases where that kind of thing falls apart, and I don't have a large security team working to keep your data secure. So I don't want it.

I came to this conclusion today when reading about how Google is very interested in closing off http traffic and what that can mean for the future of the web as an archive. I can see the benefits of secure websites, but I can also see how that is not such a big deal when it comes to read-only content. If I can provide interactive web components, applications, games, and other stuff without any of the data going anywhere but your hard drive, your cookies, an in-browser database that you own, and none of that ever comes across the wire to me, I consider that a win. I know that there are important metrics to be gained through analytics - which posts perform better, which controls people hit when they're trying to accomplish a task, and how far people get into content before turning away. Those are valuable things for people who want an audience who they have a vested cough cough financial interest in sticking around, but this site, my personal projects, those are all purely interest-driven, and I have no interest in knowing your email address, or your browsing habits. I'm not going to serve you ads, because I have a job that pays me well enough not to worry about that.

I haven't really come to any firm conclusions about whether I support a fully https web or whether there's room for read-only sites to be http, but I know that there are problems inherent in sites that want your data, want you to sign up in order to verify your identity or whatever.

I've been thinking about that part of the web for awhile now, the need for companies to get a profile on you, and I've been thinking about ways to have sites and companies not do that. None of my thoughts in this area are more than partially baked, but when I have something that I'm ready to share, you can bet it'll be here.

Ramble over. Have a good night.

Or whatever time of day this finds you.

Liam