I’m fairly new to Piwik. We’re using it to track use on several of our internal web sites. I have the users’ login information so I can set the userId in the javascript tracking. However, there’s some concern that the userId may have to be anonymous.
I looked at the docs and the code and it looks like both the original userid and a hashed version are stored. Does this mean I have to hash the original userId before I send it along (I don’t want to touch piwik at all). Is there a better solution or have I misunderstood the problem?
The primary benefit of using and id is to identify users, sending a simple one-way hash or simple substitution encoding like rot13 to piwik might suffice.
In terms of data protection, a one-way hash is not be considered anonymization but rather a de-identification so that a more restricted set of people can identify the user.
The primary benefit of tracking users, I think would be to track across platforms and browsers. Which is interesting, but basic cookie tracking might suffice in terms of optimizing and managing the intranet.