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There are no tracking cookies on this website. No banner asking you to accept them, no pixel following you to the next site, no profile being built out of what you looked at.

This is not a feature. It's a cost, and I want to be honest about what it costs.

I do measure. There is analytics on this site — how many people come, which page they land on, how long they stay, which link brought them. It just doesn't use cookies and doesn't know who you are. It counts visits, not people. Nothing is stored that could be tied back to you, and nothing goes to anyone who sells advertising.

What that costs me is the rest of it. I can't follow a visitor to the next website and show them the speaker again. I can't tell which specific person came close to buying and nudge them back. The tools that make modern advertising work — retargeting, individual conversion tracking, audience profiles — all require following people around after they leave. Those I don't use, which means I'm doing the harder version of a thing I'm already not very good at.

So why.

Because the speaker doesn't listen to you. There is no microphone in the Halo. No voice assistant waiting for its name, no recording of what plays in your kitchen, nothing leaving your house. That wasn't a cost decision. A microphone is cheap. It was a decision about what a thing in your living room should be allowed to do.

And if that's the product, it can't stop at the product. A speaker that doesn't listen, sold through a website that watches you, is a speaker that doesn't listen on Tuesdays. Either the principle holds everywhere or it isn't one.

It is a connected device. It streams, it updates, it talks to your phone — a smart speaker in the ordinary sense of the term. Just not that smart. Smart enough to play what you ask for from wherever you are in the room. Not smart enough to know who asked, or what else you said that evening.

Most of the audio industry made the opposite choice, and I understand why. An assistant sells. Data makes advertising work. The companies that collect it can find their customers far more cheaply than I can find mine, and in a category where everyone does it, not doing it is close to a handicap.

I'd rather carry the handicap than explain it away later.

So this site counts that someone was here, and nothing more. You can look around, read the whole thing, close the tab, and nothing follows you out. No ad for a speaker turning up in your feed tomorrow. If you come back next month, we start again as strangers. That's a worse way to run a business and a better way to be in someone's house.