Good news for Web site owners and digital marketers!
The Tip of the Spear Blog is now using the open-source TMS (tag management system) offered by Matomo. In fact, I installed it myself with one auto-generated tracking tag (Matomo) in about 15 minutes. It was a little tricky seeing all the moving parts for the first time up close and personal. Still, it was good to see a new TMS option available for Web site owners.
Matomo (f/k/a Piwik) for those who don’t know has been a low-cost open-source platform for Web site analytics for about ten years. Matomo has more popular outside the US where people have not drunk Big G’s fake free kool-aid. Matomo is highly recommended for those that do not want to contribute to Big G’s data ingestion Trojan Horse a/k/a Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager. All you need is a Web server and instance of MySQL.
Matomo’s site analytics and tag management technology is highly recommended for those that do not want to share their user’s Web site behavioral data with Big G’s data ingestion Trojan Horse (a/k/a Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager). All you really need is a Web server and instance of MySQL.
The bad news is that in the process, I discovered that even after removing any and all WordPress plugins, there still seem to be phantom trackers including several for Google: Analytics, Display Bid Management, Publisher and Tag Manager. How is that possible?
TOTSB get that nothing is free, but nowhere during the WordPress blog creation process did it mention that my blog would be providing tracking fodder for Big G and other targeting wannabes. It is this kind of sleight-of-hand and non-transparency that leads to ignorant users, false expectations and then misguided calls for government regulation.
TOTSB will continue looking for ways to remove these trackers but will also look to see about alternative blog publishing platforms, if needed.
In other news, the sharp folks at Evidon have released a new tool that takes tag management up a level into tracker management. Evidon is known for their privacy consent capabilities and is where Ghostery originated. They also pioneered tracking monitoring a few years back with their TrackerMap service that allows Web site owners to understand the latent piggybacking going on from their supposed partners. The new “tracker management” service gores from the tree-level up to the forest level view. It requires a hard-coded co-pilot tag on each page that can actually suppress piggybacking, i.e. stop it cold from sketchy partners and agency noobs. Bravo Evidon!
