Remembering the new Agastya

When I shipped the “new Agastya” in 2018, GDPR had just gone live and a one-line accessibility widget still felt like a small superpower for the web rather than something people argued about on Twitter every week 🧩👇 We framed it as privacy‑first: IPs were run through a one‑way hash, so you still got city, browser, and mode insights without keeping obvious identifiers. Both site owners and end users could export or delete their data, and a built‑in cookie banner showed up only for EU visitors, with consent state exposed over an API. On the tech side, we improved single‑page app tracking, auto‑detected language to localize the UI, and shipped a 1.3 KB loader from a 150+ PoP CDN, with a fresh Vue.js interface loaded on demand. From 2026, the privacy story mostly holds up. The accessibility story is more nuanced. A widget is a nice shortcut for contrast modes or reading aids, but it still cannot replace proper, semantic, WCAG‑driven design. The real work has to move into the product itself, not just into a floating button. https://anandchowdhary.com/blog/2018/new-agastya