Google Analytics

Privacy Issues

To protect user privacy, removing personally Identifiable Information (PII) before sending data to Google is one way, as is anonymizing IP and disabling tracking. Further, to hide tracking one can use a VPN to access sites. Indeed, Analytics requires website owners that PII be stripped when using Google Analytics. [1]

Tue Feb 4, 2020

Michael Altfield Attachments 10:07 AM (27 minutes ago) to me, Andreas

We intentionally do not use google analytics; we use awstats.

I intentionally stripped google analytics scripts from our websites as an important step to de-googleify our sites (using open-source alternatives and protecting our visitor's privacy from Google). We looked into Piwik in 2017 as a self-hosted GA alternative, but it had numerous security issues. Currently, we collect analytics on our web traffic using awstats.

* https://wiki.opensourceecology.org/wiki/Piwik
* https://wiki.opensourceecology.org/wiki/Awstats

> update your registration pages for better > demographic data

Perhaps we can add any desired missing data points (opt-in) to our phplist signup page or something similar. Or a distinct survey.

In any case, *before* we ask or collect any of this data, we need to clearly enumerate all of the data that we want to collect, write down why it's necessary for us to collect it, and for how long we're storing it. Then we must update our privacy policy accordingly with this (required by GDPR, CCPA, etc).

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https://wiki.opensourceecology.org/wiki/Open_Source_Ecology:Privacy_policy#Newsletters

Michael Altfield

Senior System Administrator PGP Fingerprint: 8A4B 0AF8 162F 3B6A 79B7 70D2 AA3E DF71 60E2 D97B

Open Source Ecology www.opensourceecology.org