Is Piwik still relevant?

General questions
1

Hi,

I have been using Piwik for years and now more and more people are blocking tracking, me first, but I do it for advertising.
First, I don’t understand why Piwik is considered a privacy issue? And therefore had to be blocked.
Second, the day all the web browsers will come with tracking blocked by default, what Piwik will be used for?

Thank you to give constructive answers.

2

I’m interested in this topic too.

If you hide the filenames of Piwik, most won’t block it.
(Use dsnjfdjs.php instead of piwik.php, by redirect or rename. Don’t use piwik.js as the name, etc.)

You can do it manually, but as I read, you might be able to change the url via the Tracker Proxy too
http://piwik.org/faq/how-to/faq_132/

To properly track visitors with JavaScript disabled, you actually have to change the original HTML snippet they gave, and add 1 parameter to enable it.
http://piwik.org/faq/how-to/faq_176/

A few days ago (October 2016) I did a thorough test because I thought that Piwik wasn’t tracking all visitors. I had the Piwik rename thing already done, plus tracking the non-JS visitors. With those in place, none of these solutions blocked Piwik:

  • Firefox private browsing window
  • Chrome incognito mode
  • uBlock Chrome, uBlock Firefox
  • Adblock Chrome
  • Adblock Plus Chrome, Adblock Plus Firefox
  • Ghostery
  • Disconnect

If someone has tips on what other solutions could be blocking Piwik right now, I’m interested to hear!

2 Likes
3

Thank you Endre,

This is very interesting.

At the moment I have setup my server so it imports back logs from Apache daily, it is not ideal, but this way I’m sure I don’t miss any visits.