What is Reddit's opinion of Matomo?

From 3.5 billion Reddit comments

> All this information is essential for sysadmins and web developers to troubleshoot potential issues with the site or the server.

not really, having managed matomo instances, it is far more an analytics of visitors tool than a tool used to troubleshoot server issues, for those you are better off looking at daemon generated logs. (even if there were no analytics it's likely system logs are on and collecting similar data but people over look that)

It's a google analytics replacement so will gather as much or as little information as you want. from as simple as what page a looked at all the way down to heat maps of mouse movement on pages.

Matomo does make an effort to protect peoples privacy but even with only recording one octet of an IP address, it's still possible to uniquely track visitors, just their IP is hidden from the Matomo users.

Having said all that, the whole situation was handled poorly, by both u/Axxxse and /u/burunghantu. The ban does not seem to have been justified but either was this post claiming an updating of the privacy policy to clarify what the site is doing was some sort of conspiracy to track us.

NB: the "No Google Analytics" at the bottom of the site is a bit disingenuous, as while technically true, it very likely leads most people to assume they use no analytics.

Check Matomo: https://matomo.org (ex:piwik)

It's really good, some people considering it to be on par with google analytics.

You can install it on your server via terminal (the hard method)/CLI. However, if you have access to cpanel (non-oss solution), you can easily install it via a few clicks. After installing it, a certain code needs to be embedded in your website to start analysing the behaviour of your visitors - they have plenty of GDPR-related settings available which you can use to make it non-intrusive)

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Basically, you need a server/location where to store the "analytics data" via Matomo. Once you got the server/location where to store the data and install Matomo, everything else is pretty straightforward imo.

The tracker used on this site is Matomo, a FOSS, self-hosted analytics tool. Cross-site tracking (such as Facebook's tracking through their like button) is a serious privacy risk, because the intention behind it is to find out as much information as possible about you . An analytics tool such as Matomo is used to find out as much information as possible about the way in which users interact with your website, with the goal being the improvement of the website. This is a huge difference, and web development without this type of feedback is very difficult. Moreover, Brave still blocks this tracker on their own website, which means they haven't built in some kind of whitelist for their own gains. In short, I don't really see the problem with this.

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>Google Analytics => Matomo and more

Let's face it, realistically people use Google Analytics because its free but also hosted for them at that price of free. None of those are real alternatives to people who suddenly want to become responsible for maintaining their own copies of software. Not everyone has the brain time to do it all.

Completely removing support from projects for Google Analytics instead of simply making it optional with support for other software is pretty draconian in of itself and insulting end users supposed freedom.

I just can't trust ProtonMail. Here are some of concerns:

• When they will be completely open-source?

• Sign-up needs reCAPTCHA (seriously?), SMS or Email. I wouldn't expect this from a company which claims to protect privacy.

• Swiss privacy is dead already. Still ProtonMail keeps marketing it. What a snake oil.

• They collect your metadata and includes an accurate Matomo analytics.

That's a false positive actually, it's for a self-hosted instance of matomo we use at Brave :) Andro and Desktop don't report it in shields

https://github.com/brave/brave-ios/issues/3101 https://matomo.org/

Hallo u/bushhduhh,

du sagst du findest keine Lösung. Was hast du denn bereits probiert?

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Ist Ecommerce aktiviert im Adminbereich von Matomo?

Hast du den Leitfaden in der Matomo-Dokumentation beachtet?

Welches von den 6 Plugins genau nutzt du für die Shopware?

Und handelt es sich um Shopware 5 oder 6?

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Viel Erfolg bei deiner weiteren Suche.

You can host your Matomo at https://matomo.org/download/ and host it yourself at Vultr/DigitalOcean for like $5 or on your own server at home if that is your thing.

I agree your dashboard looks great. But I am about hosting my own site analytics.

https://matomo.org/blog/2020/07/storing-data-on-us-cloud-servers-dont-comply-with-gdpr/ As per this, maybe it is not necessary to store it in Europe but you can’t store in the US because of the surveillance laws they have. Sorry for my mistake. Maybe with consent and enough protection it could be possible, but it is definitely the safest to avoid it (Not just because of GPDR but because the us can request data from servers there any time).

Edit: I am aware I’m citing a direct competitor to google analytics that is using that information to make you switch, but that doesn’t make it less true

Matomo and Fathom are options that you can self-host, or pay for hosted.

For hosted analytics that offers a free tier (but understandably limited), you can try Clicky

The only one I've had personal experience with is what used to be Piwik: https://matomo.org/

https://matomo.org/docs/privacy/

The downside is its like PHP and MySQL (I think). But there is a self-hosted version and has heaps of settings.

Really depends on your needs...
Unless you really need fancy features, I think Matomo is more than sufficient...
AND there are plugins (some paid) for about anything

Plus... Here's a nice walkthrough on how to configure it so it doesn't track any personal data:
https://matomo.org/blog/2018/04/how-to-not-process-any-personal-data-with-matomo-and-what-it-means-for-you/

It's definitely one of the higher end pricing I've seen out there but it all depends on what all they're doing. Some analytics services are expensive, for example the heatmap plugin alone for Matomo costs $200 or so. If you're dealing with a large agency, the pricing is understandable for a fully managed website but I think the $450 expense is a little too much for a café. Since they do updates, take backup, handle all the hosting, etc., at least you'll have some peace of mind that it's in good hands.

Depending on your area, you might also want to consider hiring a freelancer at an hourly rate who will visit you at your café to do the necessary updates as and when needed. If you have that kind of money to spend, you could also keep aside $100 or $200 as a retainer so he shows up immediately after you call him for anything.

We charge an annual maintenance cost to our clients though that doesn't include hosting because of the risks (Extra costs due to the site suddenly going viral, DDoS, etc.) but I guess I need to re-evaluate my own pricing. I'm working on a website for a large company and I just realized I'm charging them less than what some companies charge to maintain a café's website.

Feel free to get in touch with me if you'd like me to evaluate what exactly you're getting for the $450. You can just PM me your URL. I won't charge you anything.

That depends on what you understand by the "current law". If you mean the Austrian or German law then only few things change and the main difference is that there are now real penalties.

I don't know the existing privacy laws in other EU countries, but it possible that a lot of things change. Matomo has a great article about what needs to be changed (not only when using Matomo): https://matomo.org/blog/2018/04/how-to-make-matomo-gdpr-compliant-in-12-steps/

If you are interested (and if you are saving data of EU citizens, then you should be), read through the guides of the British data protection authority:

https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-the-general-data-protection-regulation-gdpr/

You are definitely looking for analytics and there are many services for that. Those services usually handle a lot of the basics such as user information, page views and behaviors. But you can also send custom events. For example when a user clicks on a button to add/remove a product to their basket and whatever you want, really. Have a look at Matomo if you want full control over your data: https://matomo.org

I wouldn’t recommend to build it yourself. You would spend a lot of time reinventing something that doesn’t add value to your product (unless you are offering analytics services). Also, you would go through a lot of trial and error as the subject is pretty complex.

If you don't mind a paid solution, you can check out Fathom, it is a privacy-first solution. Alternatively you can try Matomo, which is self-hosted and open source. Matomo for instance respects the browser's 'do not track' setting, and anonymizes IPs

Another strategy, which avoids cookie notification: Don't set cookies to start with.

Often cookies are not necessary, unless you do advanced tracking. For example, Matomo can be configured to disable all cookies, while still deliver perfectly useful visitor statistics. As a bonus, you can host it on your own server, and not share your users' data with a third-party.

What kind of cookies are being set, apart from the ones you already mentioned?

Like /u/dashcubeit mentioned, Matomo is an excellent alternative! I've been using it for quite a while now for personal projects. Never managed to get clients onto it, because they only care about Google Analytics, even though they only use GA to get visitors' statistics; no funnels, segmentation and what not. Just plain old counter.

If you also control the server (or if it's configured to allow you access to them), you can also count visitors based on server access instead of running JS in the client. Matomo supports both JS on the client AND server logs!

> Isn't there an option in Google Analytics - as a web master - to disable tracking of personal info and instead maintain Analytics only as a testing and reporting tool (to figure out performance bottlenecks, bad designs etc.)?

You basically described Matomo.

Anyway, would you trust it to be actually turned off just because the settings in Google's dashboard say so? Google doesn't exactly has the reputation or track record of an honest company.

Possible alternative to Google Ads/AdMob/AdSense:

Matomo(formerly called Piwik Analytics)

https://matomo.org/faq/new-to-piwik/#faq_15

> Matomo (Piwik) is the leading open source web analytics software used on more than one million websites in 200 countries. But when there are also dozens of other free and paid web analytics solutions, why choose Matomo? One of the principle advantages of Matomo is that you are in control. Unlike remote-hosted services (such as Google Analytics, Webtrends or Adobe Analytics), you host Matomo on your own server and the data is tracked inside your Mysql database. Because Matomo is installed on your server, you enjoy full control over your data. You can access the data easily via the Matomo APIs. Advanced users can use Custom Dimensions, Segmentation, or even run manual queries on the database in order to build advanced reports. Matomo can be used to measure your websites, your mobile applications, your software applications, and can also be used on your intranet portals and intranet websites.

> Matomo (Piwik) also protects your visitor privacy with advanced Privacy features. When using Matomo for Web Analytics, you ensure that your visitors behaviour on your website(s) is not shared with advertising companies.

Disclaimer: I am not sure if Matomo is privacy friendly.

This wikipedia article claims Matomo is free(as in libre software) and open source.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matomo_(software)

I don't use OpenKeyChain, but your comment intrigued me. So I installed it and checked out. Indeed it contains a tracker called Matomo, whose privacy policy doesn't mention anything about end-user! Huh! What's more is that, they say that they further use 3rd party services. Check their privacy policy, which doesn't seem convincing. You'd probably be better off with an alternative, perhaps(?).

But, F-Droid, NewPipe use Application Crash Reports for Android (ACRA) for crash reporting only. You may visit the link to know more.

Firefox Klar and Tor (Fennec, too) use the Mozilla telemetric service, only. That can be disabled in the settings.

So, your issue now is with OpenKeyChain. I would love to help you here, but I don't use it, so can't suggest an alternative. Let us know if you find one, or what your next step was.

I'm going to put a URL here to Matomo, a privacy respecting telemetry service. Showing the blatantly obvious, that privacy respecting telemetry can exist.

https://matomo.org/

Take a look at Piwik. It's a self hosted analytics platform that's already taken care of a lot of the things you're looking for.

Edit: Looks like their free tier is now called Matomo

I wrote a custom thing for our game for google analytics using this interface

https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/protocol/v1/reference

Just build HTTP strings and send them to your analytics endpoint. Works well, I can see people playing in real time, and we have custom metrics and variables set up to track game features. If you're not paying you can only do up to 20 custom variables and 20 custom metrics, so something else may be suited if you need 100, or just pay for it.

Another option is to set up your own analytics with matomo on your own server so you don't have limitations. But then you gotta have the server power to handle the HTTP requests

https://matomo.org/

By the way I'm pretty sure that google analytic's website and mobile app stuff just wraps their HTTP post requests in nice functions. It's really fast to write your own, plus doesn't come with the baggage of the stuff you don't need. I only needed about 1/5 of what it can do, so only implemented 1/5 of it.

edit: another thing to note about GA's app plugins: they only guarantee to work on apps. That's why I made my own thing. We have it on ps4, xbox, switch, desktops, etc. HTTP requests always work, but when they write them they like to use android/iphone specific functionailty, so it's not sure to work outside of those environments (like their whole firebase backend stuff)

This seems limited in what it tracks. You have more flexibility with matomo/pikwik.

This tracks:

• Device Ip
• User-agent
• IsMobile
• Date
• Active Time (Seconds)
• Visited url
• Location
• Referrer

Where matomo tracks:

• User IP address
• Optional User ID
• Date and time of the request
• Title of the page being viewed (Page Title)
• URL of the page being viewed (Page URL)
• URL of the page that was viewed prior to the current page (Referrer URL)
• Screen resolution being used
• Time in local user’s timezone
• Files that were clicked and downloaded (Download)
• Links to an outside domain that were clicked (Outlink)
• Pages generation time (the time it takes for webpages to be generated by the webserver and then downloaded by the user: Page speed)
• Location of the user: country, region, city, approximate latitude and longitude (Geolocation)
• Main Language of the browser being used (Accept-Language header)
• User Agent of the browser being used (User-Agent header)
• From the User-Agent, we use our Universal Device Detection library to detect the browser, operating system, device used (desktop, tablet, mobile, tv, cars, console, etc.), brand and model.
• Random unique Visitor ID
• Time of the first visit for this user
• Time of the previous visit for this user
• Number of visits for this user
• Custom Dimensions
• Custom Variables
• Campaigns
• Site Search
• Goals
• Events
• Ecommerce
• Viewing and clicking on Contents
• Mouse movements, clicks, and scrolls
• Form interactions
• Video and audio interactions

Less considering, and more has implemented.

GDPR, it is held up in courts, will force massive reorganisations in Facebook and other tech multinations.

For example, can't have EU citizen data in US clouds services.

https://matomo.org/blog/2020/07/storing-data-on-us-cloud-servers-dont-comply-with-gdpr/#:~:text=CJEU%20rules%20US%20cloud%20servers,this%20means%20for%20web%20analytics&text=Breaking%20news%3A%20On%20July%2016,GDPR%20and%20EU%20privacy%20laws.

> st von Matomo selber und nutzt ja die WordPress Datenbank mit, wird also automatisch in meinem Backup mitgesichert. Installation hat automatisch funktioniert. Muss ich sonst noch was managen?

Matomo selbst. Das Plugin bietet die Schittstelle zu On-Premise-Installation (also eigene Installation auf eigenem Server) oder in der Matomo Cloud, welches kostet.

This is the reason why we need to depend on other self-hosted solutions. Following are worth considering for alternatives and ensure privacy:

Piwik (vast events tracked)

Snowplow

Timeonsite (Basic events with user engagement accuracy, pageviews and page popularity etc.)

Personligen tycker jag att tracking egentligen är rätt äckligt. Det finns en viss mängd data som är bra att ha som utvecklare (skärmupplösning, språk, samt plattform) och från ett marketing perspektiv kan det vara bra att veta vilka kampanjer som har fungerat bra, och se hur länge folk spenderar på sidan.

Där går gränsen dock. Det finns ingen anledning att samla in folks historik, se vad för kakor de har, etc. Det är fullständigt onödigt.

Det finns privacy-oriented platforms som man kan använda (t.ex. Matomo eller Ackee). Personligen gillar jag Ackee, då den ger tillgång till bra information för utvecklaren, samtidigt som den inte inskränker på folks privatliv - du behöver inte ens en GDPR-notis.

The way I have done this is in 2 steps. The first one is to log the hit in a text file. You can either use unique log files in multiple deep directories or save the hits in one log file per day /logs/YYYY/MM/DD/stats_YYYY-MM-DD.log. The file must be locked of course to prevent data corruption.
Then have another cli tool that parses the log files every few hours and does the parsing and saves the data in a database. I'd use SQlite as it's super fast to render info.

If you need to visualize it I'd use a simple js/ajax call to pull that info so the page is not slowed down in any way.

There are other ways of course. You might be able to skip the php logging totally by coming up with a special redirect that uses mod_rewrite to look like as if it's loading a 1x1 pixel.

e.g. /products/product1-slug

then have an image that's prefixed by /cnt/products/product1-slug.gif

then have a log parser that parses the web server logs and does the counting and then saves the stats.

I haven't checked this tool in a long time but it should be possible to use matomo.org and query its data. Maybe set up a VPS just for the stats for your projects.

I will use these ideas when I start working on an affiliate program for my WP SaaS apps.

Slavi

Ah! I was just going to ask what happened to Piwik. (Years have passed since I've needed this stuff.) It's good to know it didn't disappear, but has merely been renamed to Matomo.

Dazu mal ein paar Punkte zur Rechtslage (kein Jurist, nur sehr interessiert) und zu Hintergründen:

• Login Cookies oder Session Cookies, die nicht zum weiteren Tracking verwendet werden sind technisch notwendige Cookies. Sie brauchen keine Zustimmung, auch kein Cookie Banner. Wer dennoch eines hat will eure Daten, verwendet ein Framework, dass Daten der Nutzer will, oder ist nicht informiert.
• Analytics sind auch ohne Cookie Banner möglich. Hierzu darf man Nutzer nicht über Websites hinweg verfolgen, Google Analytics fliegt raus. Keine genauen IPs aufzeichnen und muss die Nutzer in der Datenschutzerklärung darauf aufmerksam machen. Möglich mit Tools wie Matomo
• Google nutzt durchaus die Daten aus seinen Analytics Tools um individuelle Nutzer zu verfolgen. Ebenso andere weniger erfolgreiche Firmen aus dem Gebiet.
• Baut man eine Website ohne Google Analytics und ohne übermäßiges Tracking dann
  • Lädt sie schneller auf dem Endgerät
  • Nervt sie Kunden nicht mit Cookie oder schlimmer noch Consent Bannern
  • Gibt sie einem trotzdem die wichtigen Tracking Infos

Beispiel: https://xkcd.com/
Ebenso unsere Firmenwebsite, die ich hier nicht promote.
Leider fällt mir spontan keine größere deutsche Seite ein.

At my agency, we decided to move out of Google Analytics by using https://matomo.org/. I think it would suit your needs. It's a good alternative and you self-host it (very easy to setup), so you own your data.

Using server side tracking in Piwik for years - https://matomo.org/docs/log-analytics-tool-how-to/#how-to-import-more-data-including-bots-static-files-and-http-errors-tracking - many option to include bots etc

"Also analytics is essential for me to know how people behave on my site, in order for me to develop the site in the best possible way."

Use Matomo instead of GA: https://matomo.org/faq/new-to-piwik/how-do-i-use-matomo-analytics-without-consent-or-cookie-banner/

Doesn't matter. If you want to earn money with your site (be it by ads or whatever and I guess OP wants since this is the startup reddit) i.e. being a company, you have to follow the rules of each country. This means taxes, data privacy, child protection laws, gambling...

And as a german, you should know that it is factually wrong to say the law is based on the location of the server. Or rather it only matters in the case of illegal file distribution.

Also the CJEU ruled that US data centers are not safe for us europeans:
https://matomo.org/blog/2020/07/storing-data-on-us-cloud-servers-dont-comply-with-gdpr/

Look into Matomo where they claim consumer data is 'anonymized' before being processed through an ads.txt

Any type of marketing campaign requires knowing who your users are obviously which is why everyone hates how invasive it is, Matomo's catchphrase "Don’t damage your reputation with Google Analytics" hits home. Especially as a developer for advertising platforms.

But even using Matomo as your analytics when purchasing ad bids or influencer spots, it's still not going to respect the privacy of KDE users which is a real reason why a lot of people use it. (Me for instance when Microsoft got caught creating copies of all your keystrokes in W10.

Carbon Ads is another potential but don't think anyone is innocent

>Als Webseitenbetreiber möchtest Du aber Google AdSense nutzen und dazu noch die User tracken, um zu wissen, welche reißerischen Überschriften am meisten geklickt werden.

Du kannst die User auch mit goaccess.io, Matomo.org und anderen datenschutzfreundlichen Methoden verfolgen und sogar noch genauer ausspionieren, als Google es dir jemals anzeigen würde. Natürlich macht Google das deutlich schlimmer, aber als Seitenbetreiber bekommst du's halt nicht angezeigt.

Früher musste man sich als Webseitenbetreiber noch um seine Werbedeals selber kümmern oder hat eine – Oh Schreck! – professionelle Werbeagentur damit beauftragt, die das extra als Service angeboten hatten. Mit dem Aufstieg von Klickibunti-Lösungen wurden die Werbeagenturen dann durch "Marketing Manager" ersetzt. Die machen deng anzen Tag nichts Anderes als auf Instagram rumzusurfen und ab und an auf Google Webmaster Tools eine nichtssagende Grafik auszugeben.

Hatte vor 20 Jahren erwartet, dass das Internet immer besser und professioneller wird. Was wir hier sehen nennt man allerdings im Fachsprech "Regression".

>Außerdem hat man eh kein Geld für eigene Lösungen, also wird irgendeine Standardkomponente genommen. Daher sehen die Boxen in letzter Zeit fast alle gleich aus. (Was aber auch prima für Gegenmaßnahmen ist.)

Immerhin sind die Seitenbetreiber nicht so kompetent wie früher, amirite :D

Damals musste man ja auch noch für jede Seite einzeln die Trackingregeln festlegen. Heute reicht ein Regex der "adtrack_sense_[0-9]+" oder Ähnliches beinhaltet, um hunderte Seiten gleichzeitig abzudecken.

>Und damit möglichst viele Nutzer den Cookies zustimmen, machst Du es halt so schwierig und unübersichtlich wie möglich, die abzuwählen.

Bestimmt haben die das in so einem "dArK pAtTeRn SEO" Buch gelesen :D

> I think upstream might be in violation of the GDPR. Also, IANAL.

Mamoto claims to be GDPR compliant. https://matomo.org/gdpr-analytics/ The upstream would just have Mamoto manage GDPR assuming EU jurisdiction applies to them.

Although I still dislike analytics as most people won't even realize the data is being collected so they can opt out.

Hi, not an analytics specialist here, just an ex web dev consultant...

Several of my "customers" uses https://matomo.org formerly piwik. It's open source, can be hosted on prem. Offordable Cloud plan exists, pricing based on monthly page views.

Unlike Google Analytics, you are owner of your data. With matomo, there is no data sampling which is good but irrelevant for most of us.

If your "privacy convictions" allow cloud hosting, basic plan starts at 19€/month for 50.000 pageviews.

If you want to use advanced analytics functionalities like A/B testing, Heatmap, you can subscribe separately to each functionality.

Pricing: https://matomo.org/pricing/

Good luck

[Edit: added pricing link]

I've always been a fan of Matomo - https://matomo.org/. Also headsup that PIA has been bought out by Kape Technologies, who are very much a very shady company; I'd recommend switching out as and when you're at the end of your subscription.

Ah, I use Tor Browser so it's defiantly the fact I have HTTPS Everywhere on strick (edit: and NoScipt). Lol, should have thought of that. There is a little more to this that I will reply to this reply with for organization, since you may or may not be interested in it.

Thanks for asking around for me! Also thanks for adding to F-Droid. I just knew it was another great home for the best Podcast player! You see downloading apps from Google over Tor is a real pain but F-droid supports that no problem-o. You just made my life so much easier!!

Speaking of analytics maybe give Matomo a look over. It was used by Privacytools.io at one point and can be self hosted. I have no clue if it could do the job you need it to though.

Actually thank you for your suggestion. Goaccess looks pretty useful. The old ones I know of can be found if you searched for apache log analyzers, and I believe all require you fire up a browser in some way. I'm sure you can adjust/change your logging format to work with these analyzers as well. I'll list them in case you find them handy. I've not setup or used analytics in a long time, so I don't know if they suite your needs, but they should retain historical data, but it must first be in your current logs.

• https://awstats.sourceforge.io/
• https://www.c-amie.co.uk/software/analog/
• Formerly Piwik, alternative to google analytics https://matomo.org/free-software/

I was hoping I had made myself clear above. I am not in opposition of paying. However, these guys charge $70/month for my kind of traffic. If it was $4 or $14 or $24 or even maybe $34 per month, fine. But that is not what it is.

Fathom is slightly more expensive than Plausible. Matomo is... ridiculous.

Let's just quickly look at a sample of what Matomo does:

https://matomo.org/feature-overview/

> A truly unique component to Matomo’s features is Visitor Profiles. Here you evaluate every action an individual user has taken on your website which is compiled into a full historical profile.

> This lets you see what the life-time journey of an active user looks like, or perhaps you want to see what a profile looks like for a user who comes back time-and-time again without ever purchasing; there is no better way to gain insights to these journeys and this is why the Visitor Profiles feature is so widely used by Matomo users.

https://matomo.org/visitors/

> You can identify and keep track of your most important users by assigning an email address and their real name to a given profile.

> You will understand customers at a more personal level by discovering their visiting patterns overtime as well as their lifetime behaviour.

> This will give you deep insights into what interests your most loyal customers, allowing you to put forward marketing for their specific needs.

For Conversion optimization:

> Heatmaps

> Session recordings

...

"But they need data", "It's necessary and it improves the experience for everyone", "without any drawbacks". Just no. r/privacy defends that shit, uBO blocks that shit.

Sorry, not sorry but I believe this is the developer's choice at the end of the day.

>We also need people to help us convince maintainers to use open source alternatives like Matomo instead of Google Analytics as they won't be convinced if only four people are asking for this change.

It sounds like you're not advising FOSS devs to deGoogle but rather trying to enforce it which doesn't sound any better. I'm pretty sure you can ask plenty of devs to deGoogle their FOSS and if they decide to do so, good for you but that's as far as it goes. I can't be convinced even by a thousand people that I'll have to refactor code which works perfectly just to please you when my focus isn't privacy to begin with...

Agree with you.

But if you are interested: there is Matomo which is very good, open source and easy to install.

Idk if it is lacking any features compared to Google, but I find it more then enough. Especially as you said LOS team is not huge and not doing huge marketing. I guess the mostly want to see visitor count and maybe the Browser type and if it is mobile or desktop. Matomo can handle this easily (and more).

>At the moment, I'll leave Google Analytics and Statcounter on the site as I really like to know how many visitors I get.

Well yeah, that's why everyone is using them. But some websites who care about the privacy of their users give up on them, and they opt in for something more privacy-friendly, like a self-hosted analytics software, with the possibility for end-users to opt out.

https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted#analytics (Matomo is one of the most popular)

I try to limit the use of Google services as much as possible and use https://matomo.org/ instead for my website analytics.

Edit; misread your comment. Wasn't aware of this. The world is infected by Google and FB. Independent platforms are hard to find these days.

Grafana is not a direct replacement for Google Analytics. It is more suited for displaying data and not so much saving data. Usually the data is stored is another system such as Prometheus. This means that if you really want to use Grafana to view your analytics data you need to use a seperate system where the data is collected. This will be quite the project and before you have replaced the important stuff that is present in Google Analytics you will have spent a lot of time. You would also need to write your own javascript code to send the data to this new system. My advice would be to search for a self-hosted replacement such as Matomo or Countly and start using one of these.

What are you looking for exactly? Stats for your own blog?

If that's what you're looking for, you can take a look at what most people use: Google Analytics

If you want to stay away from Google or self-host your own analytics platform, take a look at Matomo

My point, though, is GA is not your product, no matter how you want it to look.
I can't go and buy a Ford, put my name on it and claim it's my product!

If you really want to go the route of white-labelling analytics, take a look at Matomo:
https://matomo.org/feature-overview/

The good thing about using existing solutions is that they already have good privacy policies in place, and you can refer to those (in addition to having information about it in your own application). The existing solutions also have made explicit decisions (Unity Analytics in particular, since it's made for games) about what's important to keep track of for analystics so you don't have to re-discover everything by yourself.

If you want to run something by yourself, you can look at Matomo - most of the features from Google Analytics, but hosted privately. There are also a large collection of other game related analytics packages, but I don't have any experience with either.

I have now released my weather service and under a new name too, Serenum. It is privacy friendly and besides of Matomo (which is set to maximum privacy and anonymity), nothing tracks you and nothing are stored on your device (not even Matomo stores any files). Cloudflare are now gone and I have replaced it with Let's Encrypt.

I have many things left to add to Serenum, but it's working just fine as of now. An app for both iOS and Android are also in the todo list. This is just the beginning of something big!

There's 2 bugs, though, that I hope I can fix tomorrow. One of them are that Leaflet prints non-existent coordinates if you pan the map really fast and add a marker while doing so (bug in Leaflet, I think). The second bug is that Serenum continuously fetches data from Dark Sky API after the first 5 minutes using GPS.

Anyway. I hope you like Serenum :) Enjoy!

I hope everyone gives them a chance and considers paying.

We used to use this plugin, and have old versions of it on a few of our sites, but we've started using Matomo instead of Google Analytics, and they have a great WP Plugin and paid addons.

I'd encourage everyone to give it a shot if you can install software on your server. The analytics don't hide all the good shit like Google does, and you own the data.

Good for you, and your customers. Google is kinda scary. I'm a little bit of a privacy nut, so anything I can do to not use Google software, the better.

First of all, thanks for doing this! Opt-in for analytics over opt-out is a great start. Have you also considered replacing Firebase with a privacy-friendly alternative? Really depends what you use it for (if it's just analytics or computing/DB etc.). Same goes for web where there are privacy-focused alternatives over Google Analytics such as Matomo.

Analytics means tracking your use of an app: which buttons you press, how far you scroll, what time of day you use the app, IP address, your geolocation, creating separate profiles for each person's use of the app.

Here's a tiny taste of the analytics service this app uses: Session Recording.

In the title and in comments you've stressed the privacy aspect of the app. Given that, in what ways do you expect to improve our experience with the app by using Matomo?

Your privacy policy explicitly reserves the right to monitor every facet of our use of the app. Screen recordings, clicks, heat maps- even "anonymized" profiles for each of us, complete with geolocation tags, even our IP addresses. As long as it's not our name, address, email address, and phone number ("information that allows someone to identify or contact you") your privacy policy reserves the right to record all other information in private profiles about every person that downloads your app.

So I'm interested to know how you intend to use all this information to improve the service of a color-coded voice recorder and transcriber, and if you aren't planning to monitor all this, when the privacy policy will be updated.

Amazing! I'll give it a shot then.

Might I also suggest eventually ditching Google analytics in favor of something like Matomo? (which I only learned about this week, admittedly)

Just a suggestion! =)

Thanks for the reply and I can't wait to dig into your tool.

It looks like it's always going to be uncertain when it comes to Google Analytics and GDPR, which is probably why we've noticed a lot more people are moving over to self-hosted analytics https://matomo.org/blog/2020/01/google-analytics-gdpr-uncertainties/

Since Matomo uses cookies by default, I don't think that the use of Matomo would change whether a site would have to obtain consent. The analysis ends up being the same as for Google Analytics, with the slight difference that Matomo makes it easier to disable cookies.

More and more governments push privacy focused laws (which as a consumer, I really appreciate). If you really do need it, I think the best option is an opt-i n.

Since we're on that topic, I didn't check your site for Google Analytics. Great alternatives include Matomo (still needs opt-in per GDPR) and Fathom (supposedly doesn't need opt-in, haven't tried it myself yet but eager to do so on the next project).

I have some complaints, I hope you would be able to take them sensibly.

First of all, do you think it would it be possible to replace the Google trackers on the home page? I think Open Font Library could replace fonts.googleapis, and Matomo Analytics or Fathom Analytics could replace googletagmanager.

Keeping in mind that you are asking for feedback here on /r/privacytoolsio and not on some social media subreddit, I would say that I'm talking for everyone here that the login option with FB, Github and Google. Why on earth would I want the biggest data brokers in existence to know that I'm using an e-mail forwarding service? It almost defeat the point.

This a minor thing, although it can be a little annoying. Generally when you are creating different aliases you use an UUID instead of something humanly significant as . I think all of the services mentioned above create one by default, and even if you would prefer to not create one by default the option for using an UUID like this one "ea63639d-106d-4b23-ba92-d8c7faa59d8e" is not supported since "-" aren't allowed.

All in all, you got a pretty good service here, you allow to send e-mail for free which none of the previous mentioned have in their free plan. If you could work these privacy related stuff, I think you are the best option, maybe even better than Anonaddy if you add some features and aesthetics.

You can still collect and analyze user data to make meaningful business decisions and feed ML processes without violating user's privacy or trying to link that data to a specific user. Good example is using Matomo over Google Analytics.

Matomo (Formerly piwik) is good for giving you google analytics style stats. On a busy site, you need to have a very responsive (preferrably VPS based) server to manage your stats server. Especially if you have multiple sites. There are both free and paid upgrades for Matomo, and a healthy community of support. The best part of it is that YOU are the only one tracking your users, and you aren't opening your data to a 3rd party.

For someone on a budget, Google Analytics is free of monetary cost, and usually responsive and informative. It takes a while to get the full feel of, and to understand it's deeper meanings, but it also reviews your stats and tries to alert you to problem areas, and places where you could improve results. The main cost with GA is that they use a dart to track people, and so you should make sure to include this information in your TOS/Privacy Policy.

Pretty neat !

Some suggestions :

• It took me a bit of time finding the switch language button, maybe
• It doesn't load in a private browsing session (Failed to open indexedDB, are you in private browsing mode?)
• May I suggest removing Google Analytics ? (for privacy reasons). If analytics are useful to you, there are self-hosted alternatives to GA
• I'm not a huge fan of using os.org.li, it looks like typosquatting for the official osm.org.

First you should make sure that the user consents on everything you track, especially when you website should be used from people from the EU (google "GDPR"). You can use tools like https://matomo.org/ (formerly known as Piwik) to track stuff; I believe they even have a free version.

Generally speaking I find the idea of "tracking stuff that users do and then sell this information to gain a profit" extremely dubious. This does not invoke trust at all. Think about what you are doing. Only because big companies like facebook or google do this does not mean its "right". Maybe look for better ways to make money? :D

Use Self-hosted Matomo at my day job.

This I can get behind for my side business though. https://matomo.org/blog/2019/10/matomo-analytics-for-wordpress-beta/ thanks for nudging me. I’ll probably give this a go and see if I can dump the big G.

In simple terms, Google Tag Manager (GTM) is a container tool for Google Analytics system allowing agencies, site owners to adjust GA code without the need to change the GTM container, thus without the need to deploy a new code. This can be handy if you are a marketing agency managing a lot of client for example. So its capabilities are GA capabilities.

Why is it on so many sites? Unfortunately, it's pretty much industry standard for website analytics. It's many companies ultimate go-tool when they setup a new site because it integrates with everything, it's free, you can link it to Google Ads and it's fairly precise (surprisingly considering how much data Google has).

There are privacy-friendly web analytical tools such as Matomo however these are fairly niche among regular users. Also, finding an analytical or marketing firm to work with anything else than GA can be tricky.

Thanks bot but it is nothing bad, it is a well known privacy respecting matomo url creator, it helps businesses know where people are coming from when they access the website. Anybody can see for themselves here: https://matomo.org/docs/tracking-campaigns-url-builder/

With matomo.org - at least privacy in mind and opensource, cannot stand GA :D another way would be usefathom.com or just plain reading the access_log of your webserver

If you're this green to the technologies involved, I'd suggest looking at a solution like Matomo which provides self-hosted analytics out of the box:

https://matomo.org

If there's something special you need, I suspect you'll have an easier time modding that than writing from scratch, given where you're starting from. I don't mean to offend, but most backend technologies can build anything you can think of, and most "which technology do I need for this product" questions suggest you may be out of your depth building such a thing.

I'm aware, I've run websites with Google analytics in the past. Hell, it's not as dramatic as you picture it, matomo is perfectly capable of handling this kind of load.

My point is that in this case the data sharing was an unforseen side effect of analytics.

Since users merely happen to open the app when they need to, which happens to coincide with when they record data, this particular set of analytics reveals the data they are recording, because it's essentially just the date.

It's more or less a side-channel attack. App usage statistics revealing period data. Not executed maliciously, mind you. It just happens to be how the system works.

Thanks so much. I'm definitely looking into Matomo's guide on: https://matomo.org/blog/2018/04/how-to-not-process-any-personal-data-with-matomo-and-what-it-means-for-you/

Looks like I can anonymize the IP address, disable cookies, etc. I feel like I'm learning and researching so much, but somehow getting further away from the answers I need. haha, isnt that always the way!

There's also Google Analytics on https://addons.mozilla.org and on other Mozilla websites, as well as on the Get Addons tab of about:addons in Firefox. However, I believe Mozilla has a different agreement with Google than the standard agreement that allows them to collect less user data or something -- not exactly sure on the details.

Still, I don't think Mozilla should be using Google Analytics. If they must use some analytics system, they should move to a self hosted one like Matomo.

So far I could only find this: https://matomo.org/gdpr/

Does it mean, that if I it's configured to automatically anonymise data I don't need to get explicit user consent?

There are two main open-source website analytics tools that you can self host. Matomo (formerly Piwik) and Fathom.

Matomo has been around for years but is harder to scale, being built in PHP.

https://Matomo.org

Fathom otoh is relatively new and opioninated, showing you only the essentials. It scales very well, we’re handling 8M monthly pageviews on a $3 VPS with ease.

https://github.com/usefathom/fathom https://usefathom.com/

it looks like your connection to mysql is going bad. from a quick search, this post came up: https://matomo.org/faq/troubleshooting/faq_183/

you’ll want to adjust the wait timeout in mysql for a quick fix (then restart mysql, then restart apache). for an even better fix, find out which queries are slow and see if you can address them by adding an index, improving the query, or removing the plugin that makes the query that’s timing out. you can enable slow query logging here: https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.7/en/slow-query-log.html

for both the wait timeout and the slow query logging, check that those configuration options are valid for the version of mysql you’re using. the syntax may change between versions.

• get a server (VPS)
• install Matomo (Piwik) on it
• enable Custom Dimensions plugin
• add Piwik tracking code to your game, enable a new dimension
• on password submit, send a Javascript event to Matomo with the password line.

Same applies if you want to know how many people entered a specific paragraph (i.e. the ending), how many people clicked a specific link etc.

> I believe Canonical when they say that this document describes the entire scope of information they collect, store, and their uses for it.

The point is that the non explicit wording is problematic, it's not about any mistrust against Canonical.

The necessity of third party services is also questionable and it can have implications that you may not immediately think about. For example even if Canonical (or another company) don't have the intention to do cross linking of users, the data that is collected is shared with Google by using Googles services. Even when it is collected in a anonymous form for Canonical, I think we can agree on that it is not anonymous for Google. You don't need directly personally identifying information as name or email from a single site for it to become identifiable when you can systematically piece it together from multiple services and millions of websites. The policy don't really justify why Google Analytics is needed other that it is to learn about how visitors use the website and to help improve it, there is no justification in this of why one could not use other tools such as PIWIK/Matomo and thereby avoid the data sharing with a third party altogether. Similar concerns arise when you read the justification for the other services that are used. Point is, you can trust Canonical, but can you trust the third parties?

> With regard to GDPR, which is fairly recent legislation, this policy document is from two years ago and I suspect their legal team is working on an updated policy document.

GDPR was adopted two years ago (27 April 2016) and becomes enforceable next month. I do hope that what you suspect is correct because this policy do need a refresh.

It might be overkill depending on what information you're looking for, but you could host your own instance of Open-Source Matomo (formerly 'Piwik') and have your own self-run Google Analytics-like stats.

Last I played with it, it was simple as setting up another virtual host/db user, unpacking, and running their web-based install