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How to not process any personal data with Matomo and what it means for you
22 avril 2018, par InnoCraftDisclaimer: this blog post has been written by digital analysts, not lawyers. The purpose of this article is to explain how to not process any personal data with Matomo in order to avoid going through the GDPR compliance process with Matomo analytics. This work comes from our interpretation of different sources: the official GDPR text and the UK privacy commission: ICO resources. It cannot be considered as a professional legal advice. So as GDPR, this information is subject to change. GDPR may be also known as RGPD in French, Spanish, Portuguese, Datenschutz-Grundverordnung, DS-GVO in German, Algemene verordening gegevensbescherming in Dutch, Regolamento generale sulla protezione dei dati in Italian.
Are you looking for a way to not process any personal data with Matomo? If the answer is yes, you are at the right place. From our understanding, if you are not processing personal data, then you shouldn’t be concerned about GDPR. Our inspiration came from this official reference:
“The principles of data protection should therefore not apply to anonymous information, namely information which does not relate to an identified or identifiable natural person or to personal data rendered anonymous in such a manner that the data subject is not or no longer identifiable. This Regulation does not therefore concern the processing of such anonymous information, including for statistical or research purposes.“
In this blog post we are going to see how you can configure Matomo in order to not process any personal data and what the consequences are.
Which data is considered as personal according to GDPR?
From: eur-lex.europa.eu
(1) “‘personal data’ means any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person (‘data subject’); an identifiable natural person is one who can be identified, directly or indirectly, in particular by reference to an identifier such as a name, an identification number, location data, an online identifier or to one or more factors specific to the physical, physiological, genetic, mental, economic, cultural or social identity of that natural person;”
(30) “Natural persons may be associated with online identifiers provided by their devices, applications, tools and protocols, such as internet protocol addresses, cookie identifiers or other identifiers such as radio frequency identification tags. This may leave traces which, in particular when combined with unique identifiers and other information received by the servers, may be used to create profiles of the natural persons and identify them.”
So according to your Matomo configuration, it may leave some traces within the following data:
- IP addresses
- Cookies identifiers
- Page URL or page titles
- User ID and Custom “personal” data
- Ecommerce order IDs
- Location
- Heatmaps & Session Recordings
Let’s see each of them in more detail.
1. IP addresses
IP addresses can indirectly identify an individual. It can also give a good approximation of an individual’s location.
IP addresses are therefore considered as personal data which means you need to anonymize them. To do so, a feature is available within Matomo, where you can anonymize the IP. We recommend you to anonymize at least the last two bytes:
See our configuration guide for more information
What are the consequences of using this feature?
When applying IP anonymization on two bytes, you will no longer be able to see the full IP in the UI.
Moreover, there is a small chance that 2 different visitors with the same device and software configuration will be identified as the same visitor if the anonymised IP address is the same for both.
2. Cookies
It is not clear for us yet if all cookies are considered equal under GDPR. At this stage it is too early to make a definite decision.
Did you know? Matomo lets you optionally disable the creation of cookies by adding an extra line of code to your tracking code see below.
See our configuration guide for more information
What are the consequences of using this feature?
Matomo is using a few first party cookies, and the following cookies may hold personal data:
- _pk_id : contains a visitor id used to identify unique visitors
- _pk_ref : to identify from where they came from
If Matomo cannot set cookies, it will use a technique called Fingerprint. It is based on several metadata such as the operating system, browser, browser plugins, IP address, browser language; just to name a few to identify a unique visitor. As this feature is less accurate than the one using cookies, the number of visitors and visits will be affected.
3. Page URLs and page titles
URLs are not mentioned within the official GDPR text. However, we know that according to the different CMS you use, some of them may have URLs including personal identifiers.
For example:
As a result, you need to find a way to anonymize this data.
There are several ways you can perform this action according to your website. If your website is adding the personal data through query parameters, you can define a rule to exclude them from Matomo.
If the personal data are not included within query parameters, you can use the “setCustomURL” feature and write your code as follow:
See our developer documentation for more information
If you are also processing personal data within the title tag, you can use the following function: “setDocumentTitle”.
What are the consequences of using this feature?
By anonymizing the URLs containing personal data, some of your URLs will be grouped together.
4. User ID and custom personal data
User ID is a feature (a tracking code needs to be added) which allows you to identify the same user across different devices.
A User ID needs a corresponding database in order to link a user across different devices, it can be an email, a username, a name, a random number… All those data are either direct or non direct online identifiers and are therefore under the scope of GDPR.
It will be the same situation if you are using custom variables and/or custom dimensions in order to push personal data to the system.
To continue using the User ID feature but not recording personal data, you can consider using a hash function which will anonymize/convert your actual User ID into something like “3jrj3j34434834urj33j3”.
Alternatively, you can enable the feature “Anonymise User IDs”. This feature will be available starting in Matomo 3.5.0:
What are the consequences of using this feature?
Under GDPR, User ID is personal data. Anonymizing the User ID using a hash function or our built-in functionality make the User Id pseudo-anonymous, which means it can’t be easily identified to a specific user. As a result, you will still get accurate visits and unique visitors metrics, and the Visitor Profile, but without tracking the original User ID which is personal data.
5. Ecommerce order IDs
Order IDs are the reference number assigned to the products/services bought by your customers. As this information can be crossed with your internal database, it is considered as an online identifier and is therefore under the scope of GDPR. As for User ID, you can anonymize order IDs using our built-in functionality to Anonymise Order IDs (see section 4. about User Id).
What are the consequences of anonymizing order ID?
It really depends on your former use of order IDs. If you were not using them in the past then you should not see any difference.
6. Location
Based on the IP address of a visitor, Matomo can detect the visitors location. Location data is problematic for privacy as this technology has become quite accurate and can detect not only the city a visitor is from, but sometimes an even more precise position of a visitor.
In order to not leave any accurate traces, we strongly recommend you to enable the IP anonymization feature. Next, you need to enable the setting “Also use the anonymized IP address when enriching visits”. You find this setting directly below the IP anonymization. This is important as otherwise the full IP address will be used to geolocate a visitor.
What are the consequences of anonymizing location data?
The more bytes you anonymize from the IP, the more anonymized your location will be. When you remove two bytes as suggested, the city and region location reports will not be as accurate. In some cases even the country may not be detected correctly anymore.
7. Heatmaps & Session Recordings
Heatmaps & Session Recording is a premium feature in Matomo allowing you to see where users click, hover, type and scroll. With session recordings you can then replay their actions in a video.
Heatmaps & Session Recordings are under the scope of GDPR as they can disclose in some specific cases (for example: filling a contact form) personal data:
To avoid this, Matomo will anonymize all keystrokes which a user enters into a form field unless you specifically whitelist a field. Many fields that could contain personal data, such as a credit card, phone number, email address, password, social security number, and more are always anonymized and not recorded.
See our configuration guide for more information
Note that a page may still show personal information within the page as part of regular content (not a form element). For example an address, or the profile page of a forum user. We have added a feature which allows you to set an HTML attribute “data-matomo-mask” to anonymize any personal content shown in the UI.
What are the consequences of using this feature?
Mainly, you will not be able to see in plain text what people are entering into your forms.
What should you do with past data?
Once more, we have to say that we are not lawyers. So do not take our answers as legal advice. From: ec.europa.eu/newsroom/article29/document.cfm?doc_id=50053
“For example, as the GDPR requires that a controller must be able to demonstrate that valid consent was obtained, all presumed consents of which no references are kept will automatically be below the consent standard of the GDPR and will need to be renewed.”
Our interpretation is that, if you were previously relying on consent, unless you can demonstrate that valid consent was obtained, you need to get the consent back (which is almost impossible) or you need to anonymize or remove that data.
To anonymize previously tracked data, we are actively working on a feature to do just that directly within Matomo. Alternatively, you may also set up the deletion of logs after a certain amount of time.
We really hope you enjoyed reading this article. GDPR is still on the go and we are pretty sure you have a lot of questions about it. You probably would like to share our vision about it. So do not hesitate to ask us through our contact form to see how we are interpreting GDPR at Matomo and InnoCraft.
The post How to not process any personal data with Matomo and what it means for you appeared first on Analytics Platform - Matomo.
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Handling high volume traffic and traffic peaks with Matomo just got easier
16 avril 2018, par Matomo Core TeamWhen you use the self-hosted version of Matomo on-premise instead of the Matomo cloud-hosted solution, you may experience some traffic peaks on your Matomo server when the traffic volume on your websites increases. For example, every day at a certain time you might receive two or three times the amount of traffic that usually visits your website. This can have many negative impacts, including:
- Slow loading time for your JavaScript tracker (piwik.js) which in turn may slow down your website giving your users a poor experience. Also you may see less page views in Matomo because by the time the tracker is loaded on your website, the user has already moved on to another page.
- Some tracking requests might be simply ignored at some point because your server might not be able to handle any tracking requests anymore which results in many untracked visits and page views.
- You may need additional servers only to handle traffic peaks which results in increased server costs, maintenance work and maintenance costs.
The solution
Handling traffic peaks has been possible with Matomo for years using the Queued Tracking plugin. When this feature is enabled, tracking requests are put into a queue instead of being processed immediately. Then when a job is running separately it takes the requests out of the queue and processes them. This brings various benefits.
Faster tracking
It improves the tracking speed on your server by a factor of 5 to 15. So for example, instead of a tracking request taking 50ms, it takes only 5ms. This means your server will be able to handle a lot more concurrent requests compared to the traditional tracking and is likely to survive traffics peaks much more likely without any trouble at all.
Faster processing
When a request is queued, the request still needs to be processed eventually. Because the Queued Tracking solution can take multiple tracking requests out of the queue at once and process them in one go, the processing speed increases massively as well. This is because by default each tracking request has to bootstrap Matomo and do a lot of things again and again which takes quite a bit of time (you’d be surprised). Instead, many things can now be cached and don’t have to be done multiple times. As a result, your server can process tracking requests much faster and needs less resources overall which in turn reduces cost and trouble.
Queued Tracking is now easier to set up
In the background, Queued Tracking has been using Redis, an in-memory database. While Redis is very fast, it’s not simple to setup and maintain it. Especially when it comes to making Redis “highly available” and when you need to scale your Redis. Also, your servers will need a lot more memory for Redis as all queued tracking requests are stored in memory.
One click setup
We have now added support for a MySQL database so you can activate Queued Tracking with a simple click. What used to take hours or maybe even weeks to set up and a lot of maintenance, can now be cut down to seconds. Queued Tracking will then simply reuse the database that you have been using all along for storing all your visits. A side benefit is that your server won’t need more memory and all queued tracking requests even survive a server reboot.
Both Redis and MySQL are now supported in Queued Tracking. If you do have experience with managing Redis, we still recommend using this solution as it’s likely a bit faster. However, in most cases the MySQL solution should work just as well.
Further improvements
We have made various other improvements for Queued Tracking that increases the performance and you can now be notified when the number of queued tracking requests reaches a certain threshold. View the changelog for a list of all changes.
Learn more
We have been setting up Queued Tracking multiple times when it comes to high volume traffic or dealing with peaks and are amazed by the results. Often, we can even reduce the overall amount of needed servers.
If this sounds like something that could be beneficial to you, we recommend you have a look at the Queued Tracking page and also check out the FAQ. You might be also interested in learning how to configure Matomo for speed.
Need help with setting up, maintaining, or scaling Matomo? Get in touch now.
The post Handling high volume traffic and traffic peaks with Matomo just got easier appeared first on Analytics Platform - Matomo.
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GDPR : How to fill in the information asset register when using Matomo ?
4 avril 2018, par InnoCraftDisclaimer: this blog post has been written by digital analysts, not lawyers. The purpose of this article is to explain you in details how we filled in the information asset register for Matomo. This work comes from our interpretation of the UK privacy commission resources (ICO). It cannot be considered as professional legal advice. So as GDPR, this information is subject to change.
The information asset register is for us one of the most important parts of the GDPR implementation process. It consists of an inventory of all information systems you are using to process personal data, exactly like a ledger for an accountant. Note that small and medium-sized organizations could be exempted.
Filling out this register can be a time-consuming activity. Therefore, we decided to show you a real case sample which we did for Matomo Analytics
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How to make Matomo GDPR compliant in 12 steps
3 avril 2018, par InnoCraftImportant note: this blog post has been written by digital analysts, not lawyers. The purpose of this article is to briefly show you where Matomo is entering into play within the GDPR process. This work comes from our interpretation of the UK privacy commission: ICO. It cannot be considered as professional legal advice. So as GDPR, this information is subject to change. We strongly advise you to have a look at the different privacy authorities in order to have up to date information.
The General Data Protection Regulation (EU) 2016/679, also referred to RGPD in French, Datenschutz-Grundverordnung, DS-GVO in German, is a regulation on data protection and privacy for all individuals within the European Union. It concerns organizations worldwide dealing with EU citizens and will come into force on the 25th May 2018.
The GDPR applies to ‘personal data’ meaning any information relating to an identifiable person who can be directly or indirectly identified in particular by reference to an identifier. It includes cookies, IP addresses, User ID, location, and any other data you may have collected.
We will list below the 12 steps recommended by the UK privacy commissioner in order to be GDPR compliant and what you need to do for each step.
The 12 steps of GDPR compliance according to ICO and how it fit with Matomo
As mentioned in one of our previous blog post about GDPR, if you are not collecting any personal data with Matomo, then you are not concerned about what is written below.
If you are processing personal data in any way, here are the 12 steps to follow along with some recommendations on how to be GDPR compliant with Matomo:
1 – Awareness
Make sure that people within your organization know that you are using Matomo in order to analyze traffic on the website/app. If needed, send them the link to the “What is Matomo?” page.
2 – Information you hold
List all the personal data you are processing with Matomo within your record of processing activities. We are personally using the template provided by ICO which is composed of a set of 30 questions you need to answer regarding your use of Matomo. We have published an article which walks you through the list of questions specifically in the use case of Matomo Analytics. Please be aware that personal data may be also tracked in non-obvious ways for example as part of page URLs or page titles.
3 – Communicating privacy information
a – Add a privacy notice
Add a privacy notice wherever you are using Matomo in order to collect personal data. Please refer to the ICO documentation in order to learn how to write a privacy notice. You can learn more in our article about creating your privacy notice for Matomo Analytics. Make sure that a privacy policy link is always available on your website or app.
b – Add Matomo to your privacy policy page
Add Matomo to the list of technologies you are using on your privacy policy page and add all the necessary information to it as requested in the following checklist. To learn more check out our article about Privacy policy.
4 – Individuals’ rights
Make sure that your Matomo installation respects all the individuals’ rights. To make it short, you will need to know the features in Matomo that you need to use to respect user rights (right of access, right of rectification, right of erasure…). These features are available starting in Matomo 3.5.0 released on May 8th: GDPR tools for Matomo (User guide).
5 – Subject access requests
Make sure that you are able to answer an access request from a data subject for Matomo. For example, when a person would like to access her or his personal data that you have collected about her or him, then you will need to be you able to provide her or him with this information. We recommend you design a process for this like “Who is dealing with it?” and check that it is working. If you can answer to the nightmare letter, then you are ready. The needed features for this in Matomo will be available soon.
6 – Lawful basis for processing personal data
There are different lawful basis you can use under GDPR. It can be either “Legitimate interest” or “Explicit consent”. Do not forget to mention it within your privacy policy page. Read more in our article about lawful basis.
7 – Consent
Users should be able to remove their consent at any time. By chance, Matomo is providing a feature in order to do just that: add the opt-out feature to your privacy policy page.
We are also offering a tool that allows you optionally to require consent before any data is tracked. This will be useful if a person should be only tracked after she or he has given explicit consent to be tracked.8 – Children
If your website or app is targeted for children and you are using Matomo, extra measures will need to be taken. For example you will need to write your privacy policy even more clear and moreover getting parents consent if the child is below 13. As it is a very specific case, we strongly recommend you to follow this link for further information.
9 – Data breaches
As you may be collecting personal data with Matomo, you should also check your “data breach procedure” to define if a leak may have consequences on the privacy of the data subject. Please consult ICO’s website for further information.
10 – Data Protection by Design and Data Protection Impact Assessments
Ask yourself if you really need to process personal data within Matomo. If the data you are processing within Matomo is sensitive, we strongly recommend you to make a Data Protection Impact Assessment. A software is available from the The open source PIA software helps to carry out data protection impact assessment, by French Privacy Commissioner: CNIL.
11 – Data Protection Officers
If you are reading this article and you are the Data Protection Officer (DPO), you will not be concerned by this step. If that’s not the case, your duty is to provide to the DPO (if your business has a DPO) our blog post in order for her or him to ask you questions regarding your use of Matomo. Note that your DPO can also be interested in the different data that Matomo can process: “What data does Matomo track?” (FAQ).
12 – International
Matomo data is hosted wherever you want. So according to the location of the data, you will need to show specific safeguard except for EU. For example regarding the USA, you will have to check if your web hosting platform is registered to the Privacy Shield: privacyshield.gov/list
Note: our Matomo cloud infrastructure is based in France.That’s the end of this blog post. As GDPR is a huge topic, we will release many more blog posts in the upcoming weeks. If there are any Matomo GDPR topic related posts you would like us to write, please feel free to contact us.
The post How to make Matomo GDPR compliant in 12 steps appeared first on Analytics Platform - Matomo.
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How to install a Matomo premium feature
31 janvier 2018, par InnoCraftYou may have noticed over the last few months that many fantastic new features have been launched on the Matomo Marketplace. As some of them are paid premium features, you may wonder if the process to install them is straightforward, if you can test them before, and whether there is any support behind it. No worries – we’ve got you covered! This blog post will answer some questions you may have about getting your first premium plugin.
So why are there some premium features?
Researching, building, documenting, testing and maintaining quality products take years of experience and months of hard work by the team behind the scenes. When you purchase a premium plugin, you get a fully working product and you directly help the Matomo core engineers to grow and fund the new Free Matomo versions and cool features.
However, it is important for us to mention that Matomo will always be free, it is a Free software under GPLv3 license and it will always be the same.
Want to know more about this? Check out our FAQ about why there are premium features.Can I test a premium feature before a purchase?
Absolutely. There are two ways in order to do that:
- InnoCraft Matomo Cloud
- Matomo Marketplace
1. InnoCraft Matomo Cloud
The easiest way is to create a free trial account (one minute of your time) on our Matomo cloud service. You will then have the possibility to test all the premium features during a 30-day trial period. No credit card is required.
Every premium feature can be trialled for free on the Matomo Cloud
2. Matomo Marketplace
The second way is to get the premium feature from the Matomo Marketplace. We have an easy and hassle-free 30-day money back guarantee period on each feature. This means that if you are not happy with a premium feature and you are within the 30-day period, then you will get a full refund for it. Guaranteed!
How to purchase and install a premium feature?
Step 1: Purchasing the feature
In order to get a premium feature, just add it to the cart:
Once done, go to your cart and complete the checkout process to confirm the order.
When the order is confirmed, you immediately get your license key on the order confirmation page. You also receive the license key by email.
Step 2: Activating the feature in your Matomo
Now that you have received the license key, it is time to activate the plugin in your Matomo:
- Log in to your Matomo and go to “Administration => Marketplace
- Copy / paste the license key into the license field at the top of the page and click “Activate”
- The key will now be activated and you will see a couple of new buttons.
- To install the premium feature(s) you just purchased in one click, simply click on “Install purchased plugins”. Alternatively, you can scroll down in the Marketplace to the premium feature you purchased and click on “Install”. You can also download the ZIP file on https://shop.matomo.org/my-account/downloads
And that’s it. The installation of a premium feature is as easy as copy/pasting the license key and clicking a button. Because one license key is linked to all purchased premium features, you only need to enter the license key once. The next time you purchase a premium feature, you simply click on “Install” to have it up and running.
Updating a premium feature
Updates for premium features work just like regular plugin updates. When there is a new update available, you will see a notification in the Matomo UI and also receive an email (if enabled under “General Settings”). To upgrade the feature simply click on “Update” and you’re done.
Which support is provided for each of those premium features?
Premium features represent most of our day to day activity, so you can be 100% sure that we will do our maximum in order to answer any of your questions regarding them. To be 100% transparent, we often receive answers from our customers telling us how impressed they are by the quality of the service we are offering.
Have any questions?
We are happy to answer any questions you may have so feel free to get in touch with us.
Thanks!
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