It is a special Sunday here for us at Matomo, as today is international Data Privacy Day. The day was created in 2007 to raise awareness of the importance of data privacy for people and businesses worldwide.
What is data privacy about?
Personal data refers to any data which is collected and can be linked to an individual human being such as phone records, credit card transactions, GPS position, IP addresses, browsing history… So basically, personal data refers to your identity online. That is why you should be highly concerned about sending your personal data (or your customers’ personal data) away. It is important to be aware of who is collecting the information and how it is being used.
What big changes are happening in 2018?
New privacy regulations GDPR comes into play next May 2018: GDPR will bring about some changes (in the right direction) by making people and businesses aware of what data privacy means, and what they should be doing to protect their customers’ privacy. With these new regulations, data privacy awareness is reaching a critical milestone this year.
How can I protect my privacy?
Here are a few tips to protect your privacy:
- Educate yourself on the importance of privacy: the more informed you are the better.
- Use open source solutions where you can keep full control of your own data (such as NextCloud instead of Dropbox and of course Matomo instead of Google Analytics),
- Experiment with different online services to protect your data privacy, for example using an alternative search engine (such as DuckDuckGo instead of Google) or an alternative email provider (such as ProtonMail).
What’s coming next for Matomo and Privacy?
Here at Matomo, we are building the leading decentralised open web analytics platform. We’re currently working on new sets of privacy features to make compliance with GDPR a breeze. Stay tuned here to be notified when we launch the new privacy compliance tools!
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