When you open a website, use an app, or enter an online experience, the vendor will most likely track you using an analytics tool.

Like us, most vendors want to know how their provided services work and learn more about their audience.

The scope of the tracked Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) is different for every vendor.

For us, the main KPIs are the number of people using ProudZone, how people find us, and which experiences they visit most.

So far so good. But here comes the tricky question. How do vendors collect, use, and store these metrics?

The majority of available tools are using cloud-based systems. These tools collect the audience data and store it on third-party servers. Depending on the service, the provider may also use this data, anonymized, for global benchmarking and statistics.

To be fair, in most cases, that is fine. These analytics tools are easy to use, well known, and also often free to use until you hit a specific number of audiences per month. In one way, the vendors you might visit pay for the service with the data they collect from you as their audience.

With ProudZone’s focus on data privacy and data sovereignty, we have to think and handle it differently.

We are even planning to build our own on-premises AI infrastructure to keep user data as secure as possible. So, letting automatically tracked analytics leave our ecosystem just seems wrong.

Just because a tool tracks the data instead of the audience actively sharing it, that doesn’t mean we don’t see it as personal data.

And users are often not aware that they share this information with the vendor — unless they actively disable data collection. For guidance on how to browse more privately, we’ve summarized some information at https://proud.zone/wiki/safety/

All of these considerations led us to decide to use Matomo. Matomo is a privacy-focused analytics tool: open-source, self-hostable, and built around full data ownership.

Unlike most analytics tools, Matomo gives organizations like us complete control over data storage and who can access it. This allows us to run analytics entirely within our own ecosystem. At the moment, we are hosting Matomo on our servers in Germany.

Understanding our audience better through a privacy-focused analytics tool is important to build the privacy-first online neighborhood our community deserves.