Introduction
Friendly Analytics is based on the open source software Matomo. The data collected therefore largely corresponds to the data that Matomo also tracks in the default configuration.
However, unlike the default Matomo configuration, we have configured all settings for maximum privacy:
- We anonymize the last two bytes of the IP address
- We do not set cookies
- If a customer uses the user ID function, we replace the ID with a pseudonym (salted hash)
- If a customer submits an e-commerce order ID to Friendly Analytics, we replace it with a pseudonym
- We anonymize referral URLs (we only store the domain of the referral, not the path or query string, because these may contain personal data)
- We do not allow heatmaps and session recording
Our tracking in detail
Friendly Analytics tracks the following data. All of this data cannot normally be attributed to a specific individual and is therefore not personally identifiable information (PII):
- IP address (anonymized): The IP address of the website visitor. The last two bytes are anonymized, therefore it is not considered personal data.
- Date and time of the request
- Page Title: Title of the page being viewed
- Page URL: URL of the page being viewed
- Referrer URL (anonymized): URL of the page that was viewed prior to the current page. For privacy reasons, we only process the domain without path and query string.
- Screen resolution being used
- Time in local user’s timezone
- Downloads: Files that were clicked and downloaded
- Outlinks: Links to an outside domain that were clicked
- Pages generation time (the time it takes for webpages to be generated by the webserver and then downloaded by the user)
- Location of the user: country, region, city, approximate latitude and longitude (Geolocation)
- Main Language of the browser being used (Accept-Language header)
- User Agent of the browser being used (User-Agent header). From the User-Agent, we detect the browser, operating system, device used (desktop, tablet, mobile, tv, cars, console, etc.), brand and model.
Caution when using these features
A website may transfer personal identifiable information to Friendly Analytics under certain circumstances. It is your responsibility not to do this if you do not want to track personal data:
- When you submit a User ID to Friendly Analytics, it may contain personal information.
- If you use custom dimensions and custom variables, you could store personal data in them.
- If you use a website search and track the search terms, they may contain personal data (for example, if users search for their own name or zip code in the website search engine).
- Page URLs as well as page titles and custom events may contain personal data, depending on how your website(s) is designed (e.g., if the page URL or URL parameters contain personal data such as email, zip code, name, or a physical address - which would generally not be a good idea).
- If you submit e-commerce order IDs to Friendly Analytics, this could usually be used to infer the customer.