Are you being tracked - Do Our Websites Reflect Our Permaculture Ethics?

Permaculture asks us to practise People Care and Earth Care and Fair Share. Those ethical principles apply to our digital spaces, too. A website is often someone’s first encounter with an organisation. What happens when they arrive should reflect the values we teach. 

While revisiting the website research behind my book Digitale Permaculture, I also examined what permaculture websites load during a first visit. Two patterns stood out.

People Care means respecting a visitor’s choice

On seven sites, I observed an analytics request or a cookie used to identify or attribute a visitor before they had made a choice. The methods varied: some sites sent Matomo page views; others set attribution cookies. On the Permaculture Association Britain website, an Ahrefs Analytics event was sent before a choice and again in a separate test after I selected “No, thanks”. Means: I have been tracked no matter my choice. 

A cookie banner cannot give people meaningful control if tracking has already begun. That is difficult to reconcile with People Care. Visitors deserve to understand what is happening and to make a real choice before their activity is measured.

“No cookies” does not necessarily mean “no tracking.” Matomo, for example, distinguishes between consent for cookies and consent for tracking. In one configuration, it can send tracking requests while withholding cookies. See the Matomo’s consent documentation

Earth Care means questioning digital dependencies

I also found Google services on 14 of the sites examined, including Google Analytics, reCAPTCHA, YouTube and DoubleClick. These services do different jobs: reCAPTCHA is a security tool, Google Fonts provide remote hosted fonts and Google Analytics is of course for website tracking. Finding the Google Analytics script does not by itself prove that an analytics event was sent. Still, each integration is a design choice worth examining. Does the site need it? What does it load for every visitor? Who controls the service and the data?

Open-source options exist. Matomo and Umami can be self-hosted, giving organisations more control over how analytics is configured and where data is kept. Choosing open source does not automatically make a website sustainable; the whole implementation matters. Earth Care asks us to measure what we use, remove what we do not need, and build with care.

My own website, Vihreä Pourusmäki, is part of that effort. Its page contains a Matomo configuration, but no Matomo script or analytics request gets send before a visitor made a choice. It shows: A different approach is possible.

Permaculture organisations have an opportunity to make their websites an extension of their ethics: respect visitors, keep pages lean, and choose digital tools deliberately. If you would like to examine or improve your website, my company Chase & Snow offers consultancy in sustainable web design.

Method: Initial page load in a fresh browser session on 24 October 2026, before interacting with any cookie banner. A loaded Google Analytics script does not by itself establish that an analytics event was sent. reCAPTCHA is listed as a Google service, not automatically as analytics tracking.