Thoughts on Matomo (formerly Piwik)? Any site owners using it?
It's a free/libre, open-source analytics alternative to Google Analytics. It's not Google, so that's a plus, but it's still analytics, so will people just block it regardless?
@Antanicus @neil Tracking implies identifying individuals and tracking them.
Having technical caracteristics statistics about people interacting with your «service» is not the same as deducing behavioural pattern form multi-site correlations.
@webshinra @neil agreed, but from my personal point of view, it is an unnecessary violation of the user's privacy, especially in corporate environments where every bit of data WILL be used to sell more stuff.
@neil I use it and it works well. It doesn't seem to track people with "do-not-track" enabled in their browser, which means the stats on my site are slightly lower than they would otherwise be, but that's fine by me as it's their browser and their choice.
@neil I block what my ad blocker blocks. If you self hosted matomo I'm sure you could get past most filters, and personally I'd be OK with that.
@neil Maybe have a look at how the Tor Metrics tools do what they do?
https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/teams/MetricsTeam
@neil made an effort to self-host it as as way to defuse pressure to go all-in on google's advertising ecosystem, and retain some analytics capabilities while honoring Do Not Track, at a job a few years back.
ultimately i think it'd be fine for getting a view into web traffic, but what marketing people want isn't that. they want the surveillance with the market segmentation, remarketing, etc., that comes with the adtech panopticon stuff.
(i quit the job.)
@neil Even self-hosted analytics will require opt-in consent in GDPR-countries. I block it, I don't see any reasons why a website should learn so much about its visitors that aren't malicious
@neil Installed and used it once for a website (and a downloadable application from the same site.) Does what it says it does, not much to complain about.
@neil ehtically speaking, every form of tracking is wrong, but at least the data gathered by Matomo won't feed Google's AIs :)