Only thing that bothered me is that most Ad Blockers are blocking Matomo as well. I did build a little Script to circumvent that, you might find it handy as well: https://gumroad.com/l/matomo_circumvent_adblock
I use it on my website. Check if your ad blocker is capable of blocking it: https://simon-frey.com
Ah, right, creators want their content to show up for my search keywords, Google won't let them have pages only visible to Google bots (though even that is changing with the rise of paywalled sites), and they want the money from that same Google showing ads from their ad network.
Google initially promised to deliver a search for the open web unencumbered. It has become a sort of paywall itself (accept our ads or our search results will be useless pointing you to pages that only work if you have ads enabled).
Sure, it would be fair if they haven't pushed out the competition acting entirely differently ("we have no ads", "our ads are clearly marked" to current "see if you can tell a difference between an ad and your search results").
I think we can all agree there are different levels of acceptable tracking and use of that data- but the degrees of acceptance are going to be different depending on the user and service. I don't consider bypassing my restrictions to run unauthorized code to be an acceptable tracking method and raises serious concerns about how the data will then be used.
Now, I have a vested interest in this as I work on one of those tracking tools, but it actually collects less data than those Apache access_logs that people have been keeping for 25 years. Plus, the JS is unminified and easily examinable if you want (as is the HTTP request), so you also have more insight in what is being collected exactly.
"It's using JavaScript" and "it can do [..]" are massive red herrings; browsers are actually fairly sandboxed and there are millions upon millions of lines of code on your computer that can do much more than JavaScript inside a webpage.
Yes, and then you would be charged with assault. It is great that you work on a tool that respects peoples privacy. I suppose I failed to put an emphasis on trust. With server side logs, less trust is required because there is less that can be done. Paired with VPN, I can have reasonable belief that server side logging is not logging anything unreasonable and it does not require trust that they are not fingerprinting me. As you say, just because someone can do something doesn't mean they will - but trust is required, especially if there are no repercussions if that trust is violated.
I go as far as to send all the tracking parameters through a custom server script before they are proxied to GA and Matomo. That way, I can change the script and parameter names at will, making them much more difficult to block. For example, Matomo-related blocking rules are as follows:
/matomo-tracking.
/matomo.js$domain=~github.com
/matomo.php
/matomo/$domain=~github.com|~matomo.org|~wordpress.org
/piwik-$domain=~github.com|~matomo.org|~piwik.org|~piwik.pro|piwikpro.de
/piwik.$image,script,domain=~matomo.org|~piwik.org|~piwik.pro|piwikpro.de
/piwik./ping?
/piwik.js
/piwik.php
/piwik/*$domain=~github.com|~matomo.org|~piwik.org|~piwik.pro
/piwik1.
/piwik2.js
/piwik_
/piwikapi.js
/piwikC_
/piwikTracker.
I experimented with tracking on the same site and the overhead is not worth it for me. Central solution for all my projects works quite reliable
Any tracker can be made to work around ad blockers by making callbacks to the site itself and having a small shim there that forwards these pingbacks to the actual tracking service. But even then they still can be blocked based on the request contents.
PS. Here's how your website looks in Firefox - https://i.imgur.com/uFKEB4X.jpg. That's with uBlock off. No console errors.
You purchase a support license to help me to continue working on MCAB. MCAB itself is Open Source and can be found on Github: https://github.com/simonfrey/matomo_circumvent_adblock