Piwik and DoNotTrack

General questions
1

According to documentation Piwik respects the do-not-track header unless the setting is disabled in the admin section (i.e. it’s enabled by default). However my browsers are tracked despite sending DNT, and if I dig through the change logs they say that in fact DNT support is removed for browsers that send the header by default (IE and Maxthon at least).

Do I understand this correctly that DNT headers are only respected as long as they are not actually being send ? Is there a way to enable DNT for these browsers ?

Thank you,

Eike

2

Hi Eike, thanks for the question. Unfortunately Microsoft decided to enable DNT by default on all browsers. In a way they officially killed the DNT feature. Because it wasn’t a user choice not to be tracked but a default… in that sense we chose to disable DNT support for IE browsers ( IE10 Ignore Do Not Track setting for IE 10 browsers · Issue #3486 · matomo-org/piwik · GitHub then IE11 Ignore Do Not Track setting for IE 11 browsers · Issue #4482 · matomo-org/piwik · GitHub ) and Maxthon ( For maxthon browsers (Chinese Internet Explorer) then ignore DoNotTrack header as it is always enabled by mattab · Pull Request #6719 · matomo-org/piwik · GitHub )

Of course there would be value to offer ability to Full DNT support including IE so please comment in: New DoNotTrack setting to enable 100% DNT support including for IE browsers · Issue #3531 · matomo-org/piwik · GitHub - the more people ask for it we will more likely work on it. thanks!