Matomo analytics Respecting User Privacy
How We Anonymize Tracking on Our Website
You may have noticed there is no cookie consent banner on our website. Don't worry, we are not breaking any privacy laws! Quite the opposite, by default we have disabled all analytics cookies in our Matomo tracking code out of respect for our users' privacy.
By anonymizing all visitors at the gate, we don't even have to consider the cookies that are not covered by privacy laws. Call me a censor, but you don't even have to endure that annoying option to disagree to cookies that track you.
In the case where websites offer their users the option to turn off all tracking cookies, that generates cookies too, although to be fair they are purely functional, containing no personal data. During that agree/disagree stage, the cookies are designed to increase user security and privacy. Create a problem to solve a problem kind of thing.
We are willing to accept the trade-off receiving less specific data. These are the specific shortcomings in the anonymized data we receive. But we don't think we need to collect what has been deemed essential by mainstream marketers in today's data harvesting environment.
For the geeks
No-tracking option resumé .
If you are remotely interested, we have enabled "force tracking without cookies" to anonymize all our users. Additionally, Matomo will ignore all received tracking cookies on the server side. Any internal cookie consent methods will not enable cookies. Full story.
And these are the essential cookies created when sites offer the option to turn off cookies, and the reasons you might expect to find them:
piwik_ignore – When you exclude yourself from being tracked using the cookie method or using the iframe opt-out method, Matomo will create a cookie piwik_ignore set on the domain of your Matomo server
MATOMO_SESSID – MATOMO_SESSID is a temporary short-lived cookie that provides a nonce – basically a random number – which helps to prevent CSRF security issues while users opt-out of tracking.
mtm_consent and mtm_consent_removed – When you’re asking for consent before tracking visitors, these two cookies may be created: mtm_consent and mtm_consent_removed.
_pk_testcookie – The _pk_testcookie is only used to check whether the visitor’s browser supports cookies and is created without any identifier and is directly deleted.
Check out our non-tracking non-affiliate-link Store, another example of our respect for users' privacy in action.
This page forms part of our privacy policy, our effort to make the internet more private.
You could help out by filling in the anonymized form below, so we can learn a few things that will help us tweak our website. I find it much easier to read words like "I was really in France when I accessed your site" than interpret an IP address that probably came via a VPN.
