Matomo
Matomo is a resource for performing web analytics and - as we read on the website - is defined as “a powerful web analytics platform that gives you 100% data ownership.”.
Seemingly simple web analytics activities can turn out to be quite complex. They are usually oriented towards analyzing parameters deriving from access to specific web pages to calibrate the objectives to be pursued or particular actions on the content of websites (e.g., web marketing, analysis of the interest of published content, etc.).
The best-known resource for web analytics activities is certainly Google Analytics, and some also deprecate it for the level of invasiveness that would compromise privacy.
Matomo on this website
We made some specific choices for this site, as you could probably guess from the previously published posts.
Beyond the choice of Hugo which is the solution adopted for the realization of this site, we have oriented ourselves, without any doubt, towards an open-source resource that is Matomo.
On the one hand, we already knew Matomo for using it on other occasions. On the other hand, however, the feature of being an open-source resource, and the particular attention of the developers concerning privacy and protection of personal data were decisive for us.
The goal we have set for publishing content on this site is to offer surfers and readers a virtual space accessible and consultable while minimizing the impact on privacy.
To better clarify what has just been stated, the site has been designed to be “cookie-free,” avoiding any tracking system and / or profiling.
However, it seemed helpful to us to have an overview of the visits to our site to understand if the published contents are of interest and therefore continue on the same editorial line or modify it.
This need led us to use Matomo, set up for the Do Not Track.
We specified some points in the disclaimer (both in Italian and in English) published on the home page which informs the user that it is possible to choose not to be tracked - though only anonymously - by removing the flag for opt-out.
A little further down there is another disclaimer from Matomo by which it’s possible choicing whether to leave the flag for tracking anonymously
or whether to opt-out.
Matomo’s cookie is a session cookie (as you can verify with any tool), and no personal data is acquired since the navigation information is collected to obtain statistics in an anonymous and aggregate form.
Privacy and Matomo
Without wishing to bore the reader with technical dissertations on personal data protection, we would like to point out that Matomo has been developed with particular attention to privacy, as seen from what published on their site.
We believe that the user’s consent is unnecessary for the reasons we have already stated, related to the privacy-oriented configuration we have chosen for this site. After all, on Matomo’s site, these concepts are set out in an exemplary manner and we refer you to the ad hoc page.
We fully adhere to Matomo’s philosophy which opens the mentioned page with “No need to irritate visitors with consent screens.”
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