Does the Matomo control panel use session recording?

General questions
1

I recently installed the self-hosted version of Matomo (Piwik) on my sever, and a JavaScript analysis tool revealed that the Matomo control panel (where one logs in and views all of the analytics data) is tracking my mouse movements using the “mousemove” and “pointermove” JavaScript event listeners. This is present on all Matomo pages, even the login page.

This is consistent with the use of session recording or session replay, where the user’s mouse and keyboard activities are tracked and a video of the user’s actions on the webpage is generated. Is Matomo using this type of tracking on its self-hosted version? If so, is it being sent to Matomo itself or a third party, or stored locally, and is it possible to disable this feature and/or delete recorded sessions?

2

Hi,

No, the Matomo backend doesn’t track you in any way. No data will be recorded or sent to anyone (apart from the update check)

The only exception is if you are using the optional Anonymous Piwik Usage Measurement - Matomo Plugins Marketplace plugin, but even in this case only little and no personal data is recorded.

My guess without taking a closer look is that the mousemove events are used by the drag-and-drop-library on the dashboard.

3

Thank you.

Without the paid Session Replay plugin, Matomo doesn’t have any session recording capabilities on the website it is tracking either, right?

4

Hi,

Exactly, the session recording is just a feature of the premium plugin