Independent Center for Privacy Protection in Germany says Piwik can be used in compliance with data protection laws

We are proud to support User Privacy best practises and regularly work on related features and improvements.

Since January this year, we have also been in close contact with the Independent Center for Privacy Protection in Germany, Schleswig-Holstein (ULD). The aim of the collaboration was to implement data protection regulations in the source code so that Piwik can be used in compliance with the new German privacy protection laws.

To achieve this compliance, the ULD has analyzed the source code of Piwik and listed specific areas of improvement, most of which have been incorporated into Piwik 1.2 (see changelog). In addition, the ULD came up with a description and guide, to help the user set up a privacy-compliant configuration of Piwik.

This document can be found here (in German): Instructions for privacy-compliant configuration of Piwik

Some security features in Piwik listed in the document are:

AnonymizeIP plugin, which removes the right most numbers in visitor IP addresses
Visitor Opt Out widget, which provides an automatic "Web Analytics tracking & cookies Optout" feature on your site
Possibility to delete your Piwik logs and ensure limited time access to visitor level logs

Given the heated debate about privacy protection in Web Analytics software, Piwik is becoming a very important player in the Web Analytics landscape in Germany.

This entry was posted by peter on Wednesday, March 16th, 2011 ; category Community ; RSS comments.