Does Matomo track users with DNT enabled at all?

General questions
#1

Hello,

I would have one question on the topic - I am not 100% clear on it when reading online, so a confirmation would be great:

  • if a user has DoNotTrack enabled on his/her browser, would Matomo track the visits at least in an anonymity way, or would his presence on the tracked websites be fully unobserved?
    To understand user behavior, my need would in fact be to have an accurate pageviews count: I do not need to know any personal data of specific users, simply what users are generally doing. Is Matomo answering such need?

Thank you,
Michele

1 Like
GDPR, DoNotTrack by default
#2

Hi,

If a user has DNT enabled, Matomo considers this as a sign that the user wants to opt-out of tracking and doesn’t save the data at all. All requests are immediately dropped once Matomo reads the DNT header.
You can even add _paq.push(["setDoNotTrack", true]); to the tracking code which causes Matomo to not send data at all if DNT is enabled.

Of course you can disable this setting and therefore make Matomo ignore the DNT header.

There has been a discussion about a limited tracking of DNT users here:


Personally I am not a huge fan, but can understand the use case.