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Deprecate Do-Not-Track Support #20011

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sgiehl opened this issue Nov 15, 2022 · 7 comments
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Deprecate Do-Not-Track Support #20011

sgiehl opened this issue Nov 15, 2022 · 7 comments
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Enhancement For new feature suggestions that enhance Matomo's capabilities or add a new report, new API etc.
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@sgiehl
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sgiehl commented Nov 15, 2022

Summary

Matomo currently supports the Do-Not-Track-Header that was introduced by some browser years ago. The option to exclude visitors sending this header is even enabled by default.

In 2019 W3C closed the group that was working on the DNT standard and though this is meanwhile deprecated.

Safari removed the support for DNT for privacy reasons shorty after that in version 12.1.

In matter of GDPR the DNT header does also not need to be respected.

We should there no longer enabled the DNT option by default in Matomo and add a useful information explaining why this feature now is deprecated and might be removed in an upcoming major release if more browsers drop the support.

@sgiehl sgiehl added Enhancement For new feature suggestions that enhance Matomo's capabilities or add a new report, new API etc. To Triage An issue awaiting triage by a Matomo core team member labels Nov 15, 2022
@sgiehl sgiehl added this to the 5.0.0 milestone Nov 15, 2022
@justinvelluppillai justinvelluppillai removed the To Triage An issue awaiting triage by a Matomo core team member label Nov 16, 2022
@tsteur
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tsteur commented Nov 21, 2022

Do we already have an issue to remove the DNT feature in Matomo 6?

@Findus23
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@tsteur That's #20012, right?

@tsteur
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tsteur commented Nov 22, 2022

Awesome, sorry didn't notice it when I searched. I searched for everything but DNT :)

@MatomoForumNotifications

This issue has been mentioned on Matomo forums. There might be relevant details there:

https://forum.matomo.org/t/discrepancy-between-backend-database-and-matomo-tracking/52038/17

@mpdude
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mpdude commented Nov 13, 2023

In matter of GDPR the DNT header does also not need to be respected.

@sgiehl Could you please explain how you come to this conclusion? My data protection officer takes a different stance on this.

@sgiehl
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sgiehl commented Nov 13, 2023

Actually I can't remember and I can't give any legal advice. But from a logically point of view it doesn't make sense to respect a technology that is abandoned.
Safari does not even support it anymore, and some browsers are always sending the DNT header without even giving the user the choice to disable it.

Anyway, at least in Germany there seem to be judgments that say something in terms of DNT:
https://cybernews.com/tech/germany-court-bans-linkedin-from-ignoring-browser-do-not-track/

From my understanding I think this might depend on the data you are tracking and how you do it. If you are not tracking personal data at all you should be allowed to track anyone without consent (even when ignoring DNT). If you are tracking personal data you may need consent anyway, and if the user gives consent, DNT imho doesn't need to be respected anymore.
But I'm really not deep enough in GDPR to say something reliable.

Maybe @tsteur has more insights on that.

@tsteur
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tsteur commented Nov 14, 2023

I don't really have any insights on it but the recent court ruling suggests we still need to support this feature. I believe the majority of browsers also still has this feature. For example the most recent Chrome version still has this feature.

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