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Piwik should count visitors regardless of DoNotTrack #12001
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Interesting point of view. For sure we could change implementation to count those visitors. But we would need to do some kind of "internal" fingerprinting, as otherwise each page view would be counted as new visit. Would be almost the same as for those not accepting cookies. |
I see, then what about tracking within a session/visit with a session cookie, but not over several sessions? This respects DNT in a broader sense and is better than not respecting DNT at all to not lose the pageview-counts? Our data protection commissioner wrote now, that from his point of view, we (and any other public german institution) cannot deactivate the "respect DNT" feature, if this means, that Piwik will create a profile for users with active DNT. I'll ask him, if it would be okay, when Piwik would only build intra-session profiles to distinguish visits from single page views. |
Interesting idea to track anonymously the users. To ensure we track people anonymously we would need to take several steps:
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@mattab that would be cool, since we only want to have reliable data about how our website is used and what pages are visited. we don't have any interest in (and strict laws against) profiling users. Geolocation on a per-country-basis is also sufficient for this usecase, no geolocation at all iss too strict, because then we shouldn't record any data enabling to fingerprint a user. This goes too far. But this goes at all way far above my feature request to at least count users with DNT enabled. :) What technology is used by our users, how many come, where do they come from, which pages do they visit and which paths do they follow is all we want to know. |
The thing is that we can't just start tracking users with DNT without considering everything related to privacy. So we must go through the complex process of identifying everything that could lead to profiling users and remove the information, when DNT is enabled. |
Chiming in on this, this is exactly the behavior I'm looking for. We aim to minimize user tracking while providing useful feedback for understanding how our sites are used, while respecting DNT. Our choice to go with Piwik in the first place was based on a desire to have some reliable data on behavior while avoiding to give away data to Google analytics and friends. For our site we have >98% with DNT enabled at this point. In this situation we have a choice between enabling DNT-support, which we very much desire to do, or having almost no data at all. |
Hello, I would like to follow up on this. We are currently using Matomo to track our users, and are considering soon moving to some of the Premium features in order to gain better customer and products insights. Thank you, |
@mattab Do you have any update on this? |
Hi @sandeep1995 @labolanimichele, |
May I ask why this not prioritized more? Until a few minutes ago I too thought, that DNT means do not track, and not do not count at all. Nowhere is this mentioned in the admin page. Would the following be sufficient to count the view but not track the user? (With DoNotTrack disabled in the Admin panel) var dnt = (navigator.doNotTrack === "yes" || navigator.doNotTrack === "1" || navigator.msDoNotTrack === "1" || window.doNotTrack === "1");
if (dnt) {
_paq.push(["deleteCookies"]);
}
_paq.push(['trackPageView']); |
It would still track the user. There is no possibility to only increase a counter without tracking the user. |
How would it track the user without the cookie? I got this from https://matomo.org/faq/how-to/#faq_187 which says
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@ampaze You are still storing data of the visitor and depending on your definition this is tracking. And personally I consider a "Do Not Track" just like a click in the opt-out iFrame as a way of telling me that they don't want their data be store in any way. |
@Findus23 Thanks for your answer. This is probably very debatable, but the fact that someone visited my site, is not really their data. I always thought of tracking as to follow someone between multiple pages or sites, even the do not track header itself was invented to stop ad companies from building a profile by following your around. Not to stop logging a visit. |
When using the definition of tracking as per Wikipedia
would my code snippet from above fit the bill? Meaning not track the user (across different pages) but still count the visit. |
I would say if you go after this definition (which I think is a good definition and probably what they meant by DoNotTrack), then Matomo would never really track users across different sites. If you don't want to track across different pages this would likely not work by just deleting the cookies I would say. You would probably also enable Note: I didn't test it so that's still up to you. |
Thanks for contributing to this issue. As it has been several years since the last activity, and we believe it's likely not an issue anymore because Do Not Track is now largely legacy feature. It is not legally binding (i.e. there is no enforceable legal obligation to look for it and recognise it), GDPR and ePrivacy override it. If that's not the case, please feel free to either reopen this issue or open a new one. |
Hi,
we as a public german university have a problem with the behavior of Piwik regarding DoNotTrack.
At the moment, if you configure Piwik to respect the DNT-header, visitors sending a DNT-header won't be counted at all (unless they come with IE, but that's another weird problem, see #9987). In my interpretation of the DNT-specification, a submitted DNT-header means, that a user doesn't want to be tracked, i.e. he/she doesn't want to get a cookie set (or any other method like fingerprinting) to be recognized as the same user on following visits. Or even within his particular visit, when it's interpreted strictly. This says nothing about counting his/her pageviews anonymized. It is called DoNotTrack, not DoNotCount.
So Piwik should count those visitors, but not track them, if the respect-DNT-setting is activated.
On my personal blog, I did some tests in 2014 and at this time, activating DNT in Piwik resulted in only about half counted visitors (from 100-150 visitors per day to 50-100 with DNT-feature activated). On other sites, I administrate, the impact was lower, but around 20% loss in counted visitors was standard then.
For our data protection commissioner it seems to be okay, if we then don't respect DNT at all, so we'll likely deactivate this feature. But this is a shame, since we want to respect the decision of our visitors, that they don't want to be tracked between their visits. But we also want reliable statistics.
I appreciate your comments on this.
Greets,
spackmat
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