Dev4Press website will soon get a major update to the privacy policy and will remove Google Analytics in favor of our own analytics system powered by Matomo On-Premise Analytics that we will host ourselves.
For the last 6 months, I have been investigating open-source systems for website analytics, with a focus on systems that can be self-hosted. And, I decided to give Matomo On-Premise Analytics a try, and for the past few weeks, I have been running local tests, from last week I started using it live with a few of my other websites as a test for replacing Google Analytics completely.
And, with all the recent decisions involving Google Analytics and European courts, I think that it is a good time to replace Google Analytics with an alternative system that is more privacy-friendly, that keeps all the data in-house, that will no longer require cookie consent all over the place. Several EU courts have decided that Google Analytics is not compliant with GDPR laws, and more countries are expected to follow with similar decisions in the next few months.
So far, the tests I did with Matomo have been very promising, with very little impact on the website loading, and it provides a highly configurable interface giving a sufficient amount of information without tracking users. I am still tweaking the setup for the Matomo, and I hope to finish all that in the next few weeks, if everything goes fine, I plan to replace Google Analytics on Dev4Press in the first half of the next month (March 2022).
Right now, Matomo On-Premise is used on millan.dev and debug.press websites and I will add a few more to this next week.
Privacy Policy and Cookie Consent will be revised on Dev4Press as soon as the switch to Matomo On-Premise is finished, and that will include information about data retention, what is actually collected, and how it is processed.
