Why We Ditched Google Analytics
At TorGuard, we love privacy. In fact, privacy is the entire foundation of TorGuard VPN. We believe that everyone has the right to live their lives online without prying eyes of governments, tech giants, and service providers meddling in their daily business. Google Analytics is contrary to everything we believe in, so we gave them the ax. Your privacy is more important than the analytics provided by a giant tech company. Here’s why we did it, and here’s what we’re doing instead.
What Does Google Analytics Do?
Google Analytics is undoubtedly helpful for businesses, but that help comes with major concessions to user privacy. Analytics tracks a wealth of information about everyone who visits a website, from where they’re located to how long they spend browsing pages, where they came from and where they went next. This info can help businesses target customers and turn profits, but it does so at a huge price.
Many people don’t realize just how much information Google Analytics is tracking and collecting about them, and they have no concept of how significantly they’re being spied upon. Almost every website uses Google Analytics, but just because something is normal does not mean that it’s right.
Google has a history of making money off advertising by leveraging big data. They’ve made a killing on their domination of internet search, collecting data and selling it to the highest bidder. The less we can depend on Google, the better off we’ll all be.
Why We Switched to Matomo
Matomo is an open source analytics platform that TorGuard self-hosts and manages ourselves. It provides general anonymized data that respects DoNotTrack requests and easily allows users to opt out. We have configured our analytics tracking with Matomo so it does not process any personal user data or follow users around the internet. Our Matomo analytics provides us as little information as possible and automatically prevents the processing of GDPR, HIPAA, CCPA, and PECR protected data, keeping users safe and anonymous online.
Matomo provides us with all the basic analytics data we need to effectively run TorGuard, and nothing more. Our Matomo analytics are fully anonymized and exclusively under our own control. For more information, please see TorGuard’s updated privacy policy.
At TorGuard, Privacy is always Priority.
As much as TorGuard loves you, we don’t want to know anything personal about you. We don’t want to know your personal IP address, where you live, your device ID, what websites you visit, the things you click on when you’re there, or where you move the mouse. We love you so much that we don’t want anyone to know that about you as it relates to TorGuard. Ever.
TorGuard does not sell user analytics tracking data. All of our visitor IP addresses are anonymized, we don’t collect any personally identifying information, your invoice IDs and usernames in URLs (and referring URLs) are fully obfuscated, and we purge all of our anonymous data every three months.
Your safety and anonymity is our mission, and that mission is more crucial to some than others. We serve people in countries where access to uncensored, unedited, and unredacted world news is technically illegal. Where people can’t use social media to check in on their friends and family, stream movies from other countries, or view educational materials. Anonymous access to valuable information can change the world, and we would never let Google analytics stand in the way of our ability to effectively provide our privacy services to internet users in every country.
