Honor "Do Not Track" while still counting page views

[alpipego]

When a user has turned on "Do Not Track", no pageviews get tracked at all.

My understanding of DNT is, to not "track" users, try to identify them, and analyze their behavior and not necessarily not to gather statistics.

The solution I propose: Do not set a cookie or gather a referrer when a user has DNT turned on but still record the impression.

[dannyvankooten]

Hey @alpipego,

I'm afraid I can't merge this right away as it changes the default behavior of the plugin and in turn will effect statistics for people who've been running Koko Analytics for a while now. I also think it's debatable what doNotTrack actually means and what users want it to do, e.g. people might also use it to signal they don't want to waste any unnecessary bandwidth when data is limited (large parts of the world).

What we can do is make this configurable through a filter hook by adding a property to the window.koko_analytics configuration object. Would that work for you?

[alpipego]

Hi Danny, thanks for your reply and the quick fix.

I should've kept the PR as "Draft" to show you that it was more an idea than a mergeable solution.

Your solution in 9d2e133 is not quite what I had in mind, as I'd like to honor "Do Not Track" (as in I don't want to connect two data points) but I still want to collect the pageview. If that's nothing you're interested in at the moment I'm fine with that.

[dannyvankooten]

Hey @alpipego,

The main thing preventing me is that I don't see the value at this moment. All data that is stored is already completely anonymised and can in no way lead back to the visitor or connect two datapoints together. One could argue that there is no individual tracking going on anyway and we can just ignore DNT altogether (hence, the new filter).

Perhaps the following snippet is close to what you're intending to do?

window.koko_analytics.use_cookie = navigator.doNotTrack !== '1'

That will configure the plugin to only set a cookie when doNotTrack is disabled.

[alpipego]

Thanks. The combination of the filter and the window.koko_analytics.use_cookie seem to do what I was trying to achieve. 🙌

[kamauwanjoroge]

Is there an easier way to implement this in my theme's functions.php? I would like to track the pageview but not set a cookie.

[alpipego]

@askel45 add this to your functions.php:

add_filter('koko_analytics_honor_dnt', '__return_false');

add_action('wp_enqueue_scripts', function() {
    wp_add_inline_script('koko-analytics', 'window.koko_analytics.use_cookie = navigator.doNotTrack !== "1"', 'before');
});