Piwik or Piwik Pro - European Commision - what is the facts about this?

General questions
1

Hey guys

A little weird question - I know that Matomo has a story called “piwik” and that there is another solution called “Piwik Pro” - I do not know the history, but would like to know this one.
If you look at Matomo.org and at piwik.pro, both systems boast of having the European Commission as a reference - but they are hardly both right? …
Is there anyone who can help me clarify whether https://ec.europa.eu/ actually uses matomo or piwik.pro?
On the Commission’s website I can find a reference in the source text.
"" but since both systems use “piwik” as a reference - it does not make sense to identify which choice of system they have made?

Why is it so important to me? - yes I work in a state entity and in our rationale for choosing Matomo, among other things fell on the basis of privacy protection, references were also part of what we looked at. Now a citizen has pointed out that there are 2 systems that both boast of being for the European Commission’s election, and they are heavily on the scales, so this has been upside down.

Is there mn anyone here in the forum who can help me get this clarified?

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Hi,

That’s a really interesting question, and I will look into it in more detail:

Just a quick disclaimer: As you probably know Matomo and Piwik Pro don’t have anything to do with each other apart from starting from the same open source codebase some years ago. And I think I recently read that Piwik Pro replaced the last part of the original Open Source Piwik with their own code, so they are now completly separate also from a code point of view.
I won’t expand on this further as I can’t give you an unbiased view on that.

So back to the Question: Is the EU (and especially the EU commision) using Matomo or Piwik Pro?

And I think the answer is “both and neither”.

There doesn’t seem to be any tracking JS on https://ec.europa.eu/ itself. But the cookie info https://ec.europa.eu/info/cookies_en mentions “Corporate web analytics service, based on Matomo open source software” which could either refer to Piwik Pro (but be technically incorrect there) or simply some company hosting a Matomo instance for them. (Interestingly the German translation is missing the “Corporate”).

But it also links to https://ec.europa.eu/info/privacy-policy/europa-analytics_en which mentions that " Europa Analytics" is based on Matomo and “is installed on a PHP/MySQL webserver” (which I’m not sure if it is possible with Piwik Pro).
The same text can also be found at https://europa.eu/european-union/abouteuropa/privacy-policy/europa-analytics_en, but neither of those sites embed Matomo or Piwik Pro tracking.

https://edps.europa.eu/about-edps/legal-notices_en also says Europa Analytics “uses an open-source analytics platform, Matomo (formerly Piwik), fully controlled by the European Commission.”

But there is one more information for *.ec.europa.eu:
https://wikis.ec.europa.eu/display/WEBGUIDE/04.+Europa+Analytics

explains in more technical details that “No other analytics tool or service may be used” and only the “Europa Analytics” is allowed to be used on EU commission websites. Unfortunately all linked pages (including the one showing the tracking code which would clarify the question are not public.

So unless we find any ec.europa.eu site that has a tracking code embedded, my most likely guess is that Europa Analytics is probably a custom adaption of the Open Source Matomo by the EU commision.

If you want to you can find subdomains here: https://crt.sh/?q=ec.europa.eu

But even when visiting random sites like stresa.jrc.ec.europa.eu I can’t find anything tracking-related apart from a general cookie consent banner.

So as a bonus I can offer “What about other EU government bodies apart from the commision?”

https://osha.europa.eu/en/cookies uses the open source Matomo: https://piwik.osha.europa.eu/piwik/matomo.js

https://eit.europa.eu/cookies is also using Matomo (you can see the request to piwik.js with the content of a modern Matomo instance.

https://www.eea.europa.eu/about-us/data-protection/data-protection-notice uses a Matomo instance

http://www.eif.europa.eu/cookies-policy.htm uses Matomo

(I assume there are a lot more minor sites using their own Matomo instance).

But with https://eur-lex.europa.eu there is also at least one major EU website that uses Piwik Pro (and potentially even hosted by them as you can see requests to their domains).

So this isn’t really a clear answer, but I hope this helps you in finding a decision.

2 Likes
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Hi Lucas

Thank you for your prompt, thorough reply. You have gone further in detail than I am, but your points are convincing and have been sufficient for my leadership. There is still confidence in Matomo, now I just have more documentation as a basis for our continued use of matomo.

It still amazes me that Pivik Pro prides itself on being a supplier to the European Commission … but I have to leave that wonder to others to pursue.

Thank you very much for your thorough answer.

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Just for completeness sake:
This is just what can be seen on public pages. It would not surprise me if both Matomo and Piwik Pro were also used on internal or more project-related websites.

1 Like
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And one more note that I missed (thanks to @rstark):

https://ec.europa.eu is indeed loading Matomo/Piwik code, it just doesn’t seem to trigger in my browser.

You can see the _paq lines in https://europa.eu/webtools/load.js and the piwik.js is loaded from https://webanalytics.ec.europa.eu/piwik.js

1 Like
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Hi, just to clarify - https://ec.europa.eu/ loads ppms.js and calls ppms.php which are Piwik PRO’s endpoints.