Updated · June 1, 2026

On May 31, 2026, we discovered that out of our 150-some articles, only eight had been indexed in Google Search.

This was not Google’s doing — despite the hard things we have written about them. It was an oversight: our AI’s, and mine, for believing that running no stat counter made this site more credible. The thought was pure. The result proved otherwise.

So, as of June 1, 2026, we are installing Google Analytics to track traffic, and we have updated this policy accordingly: no email, no personal data, no paywall, and an influence that is not for sale. Every page written before June 1 stated, boldly, that we would not track. That statement is changed, effective 6/1/26.

Should you encounter any earlier content that still suggests otherwise, we apologize — we ran multiple site audits and believe we caught all of the corrections. If we missed one, let us know.

The original statement stands below, unedited, as the record of what we said before.

NO TRACKING

We have not installed any additional software for traffic on this site.

A short note from Spotlight Dispatch about what we do not collect, sell, share, or pretend not to know.

Most websites you visit are watching you. They identify your device, fingerprint your browser, count your scrolls, time your hovers, log your IP address, drop cookies, hand the data to advertisers, and sell whatever shapes can be made from your behavior. They do this whether or not you read what they wrote.

We do not.

We have not installed Google Analytics. We have not installed any third-party tracker — no Meta pixel, no LinkedIn pixel, no advertising tag, no fingerprinting library, no session recorder, no heatmap. We do not log your IP address. We do not set cookies. We do not have an “essential cookies” banner because we do not have any cookies to disclose. We do not share data with anyone, because we do not have data to share.

What we do is keep one integer per article. When the server renders a page, the counter for that article goes up by one. That is the entire data model: slug → count. No IP. No cookie. No user agent. No timestamp per click. No client-side beacon — there is nothing in your browser pinging us back. The increment happens on our server while it is rendering the page you asked for, and then it is done.

We publish those numbers openly at /snuck-by because if we are going to count anything we think you should be able to see what we counted. The number tells us a story got loaded N times. It tells us nothing about who, when, or where from.

That is the entire policy.

Our hosting provider — Vercel — sees inbound HTTP requests at the platform level, the way any host would. We have not enabled their analytics product. We have not connected a logging service. We have not piped traffic to any analytics vendor. Nothing is “phoning home” from your visit to anywhere except the page you asked for.

If any of that ever changes, we will tell you on this page first.

Thank you for reading. We mean it without anyone counting.

— Spotlight Dispatch