Option for complete anonymous tracking / No UVs

Hello dev team,

I think I don’t have to say how great your product is.
Anyway: We have a privacy issue in germany again. According to a court ruling, the anonymization of the IP address is not sufficient to protect the privacy of the user.
The Court criticized the use of the user based hash value as an invasion of privacy.

In germany we are not allowed to build a user profile without telling the user about that. Only to tell him wouldn’t be that problem, but we must tell him that clearly highlighted on every landing page now :confused:

Would it be possible to modify Piwik in that way, that no detection of an individual user is possible?
Of course, this feature would prevent the detection of unique visitors. But compared to other efforts, this price is rather small.

Greetings from a slightly desperate site owner,
Sebastian

+1

This courtrule makes piwik in germany not usable without risking a costly lawsuit.

To be safe from a privacy point of view, you can disable all cookies in Piwik: General - Analytics Platform - Matomo

You can also disable the “Live” plugin which will hide the visitor profile information.

Hopefully this should be enough to comply?

The generated hash code can be looked at as a number assigned by the Piwik whereas IP address is private information about the user showing his location. Such anonymization is quite an improvement from privacy point of view. Hash codes could be discarded on-the-fly (say after 3 minutes) and thus there is no user profile. Within that period of time (e.g. 3 minutes), Piwik can tell how many unique visitors.