Why is privacy so important?

Privacy has been one of the biggest topics online in the past decade for a good reason. Every online action leaves behind a trail of data, revealing where people have been and what they have done. As more of our lives migrate online, these large data sets are gathered on almost everyone going about their daily life. Often this data is collected, shared, and sold by data brokers around the world.

Privacy Protects Your Users

Marketing tools often collect data just because they can, but in reality, you do not need to know everything about a visitor to understand how they found your website. Similarly, you don’t need to identify individuals to understand which content is popular in your site. If you do not need to collect personal data, it not only makes sense to collect as little as possible to protect your user’s digital privacy, but it is also a requirement of data privacy laws in many countries.

Digital privacy can help protect individuals against many potential threats. For example, more powerful entities, such as oppressive governments, can use data for population control. Corporations can use health data against people – disadvantaging them through discrimination, or even by increasing insurance premiums. User location data can be exploited by thieves targeting properties when its residents are known to be elsewhere.

As personal privacy allows people the freedom to seek and explore new ideas without judgement and protects people from the abuses described above, protecting it positively impacts society as a whole.

Privacy Protects Your Organisation

As an organisation, collecting as little data as required minimises the severity and the potential reputational and financial damage from data breaches. In many countries, fines are issued to companies that leak personal data, on a per-user basis!

Additionally, your analytics data can reveal a lot about your organisation and its users. We recognise that you should have a choice as to whether you share your analytics data outside your organisation or not. Matomo offers the following analytics options tailored to different needs: Matomo Cloud, Matomo On-Premise, Matomo for WordPress, Matomo Log Analytics and Matomo SDK.

Matomo Cloud provides a hosted solution, reducing the technical burden while still prioritising privacy and compliance.

Matomo On-Premise or Matomo for WordPress gives you complete control by hosting analytics on your own infrastructure, ensuring your data remains private and secure.

Matomo Log Analytics enables the analysis of server logs without JavaScript tracking, making it ideal for privacy-conscious organisations that want insights without relying on cookies or similar trackers or client-side tracking.

Matomo SDK allows developers to track user interactions directly from within an application using various programming languages, including PHP, C#, and Java. Unlike traditional JavaScript-based tracking embedded in webpages, in some implementations SDK tracking can occur entirely on the server. This means that tracking does not necessarily rely on cookies or accessing data on user’s device.

Whatever your requirements, Matomo empowers you to maintain full control over your analytics data.

Strong Privacy Protections Enable Compliance with International Data Protection Regulations

In recent years, regulators worldwide have introduced new and updated data protection laws designed for the digital era. These laws impact not only local businesses – many of them have extraterritorial reach and they also apply to organisations based overseas that target users within their jurisdiction. 

There are several new and updated international privacy regulations which directly address the collection and usage of analytics data. Some of the most wide-spread and impactful privacy regulations are listed below:

Matomo’s Approach to Compliance

check mark icon Matomo helps you comply with these laws by providing:
check mark icon Full data ownership
check mark icon Configurable privacy settings
check mark icon Consent-exempt tracking in some jurisdiction (e.g.,CNIL exemption)
check mark icon User rights management.

You can learn more about Matomo’s compliance with various privacy focused laws here.