How to offer visitors option to opt out?

  • Resolved mamibe

    (@mamibe)


    8 years, 7 months ago

    According to German privacy law, website owners who use a statistics plugin must offer their visitors the option to opt out via a cookie.

    Is this already possible for WP Statistics? I could not find any reference to this. If yes, how can I use it? If no, where would I start to incorporate it – and maybe eventually contribute it to the core plugin?

    https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-statistics/

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
  • Plugin Contributor Greg Ross

    (@gregross)

    8 years, 7 months ago

    My understanding is that the opt out is only required if the IP address is tracked.

    WP Statistics supports “Hashed IP” mode which does not record the IP address of the user to comply with this requirement.

    Thread Starter mamibe

    (@mamibe)

    8 years, 7 months ago

    It is actually two issues that are not directly linked.

    1. You must ensure that real IP addresses are not recorded
    2. You must give visitor an option to opt out from all tracking that is done via cookies or plugins

    Hence, “Hashed IP” solves issue 1, but not issue 2.

    Plugin Contributor Greg Ross

    (@gregross)

    8 years, 7 months ago

    From my understanding of #2, it’s targeted at client side code, which we don’t use.

    Otherwise even your web server logs would need to be “opt out” for users.

    One item to note here is that WP Statistics does not really track users. The code never relates pages visited with a specific user, we only total up the number of visitors to each page or the site.

    Thread Starter mamibe

    (@mamibe)

    8 years, 7 months ago

    Ah, that is great news. As long as the plugin does not track users via cookie, there should be no problem with using it in Germany.

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
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