Hacker News Reader

I keep saying this: centralization is the core issue of privacy. If every website would keep their own visitors data to themselves, no one would care and businesses would thrive. This is why I think the future is self-hosted, where every site is a complete platform that locally contains all the services it needs (eg. analytics, chat, etc.).

Many of those also were incredibly simple, just counting requests, or at max setting a non-unique cookie to indicate "counted already", which has little privacy implications. And of course yes, privacy legislation and people's awareness of these things has evolved over time.

I don't know how these things worked but I guess either

- the laws and public awareness just weren't there yet and it would be illegal without consent now

or

- it was something simple without cookies, like an image that automatically incremented a counter when requested