Sheet n°16: Use analytics on your websites and applications

11 June 2020

Audience measurement tools are used to obtain information about the navigation of visitors on a website or mobile application. In particular, they make it possible to understand how users arrive at a site and to reconstruct their journey. Using cookies, they are subject to the rule of consent, except in one particular case. Please note that this section is relative to the ePrivacy directive and may be subject to national variation. Contact you local data protection agency to know its position.

Obtaining consent

  • Generally speaking, before depositing or reading a cookie or tracer, editors of sites or applications must:
    • inform Internet users of the purpose of cookies;
    • obtain their consent;
    • provide them with a means of refusing them.
  • Unless they fall exactly within the perimeter defined below, this obligation applies to tracers used for audience measurement.

To benefit from the exemption from consent

  • Subject to a number of conditions, cookies used for audience measurement are exempt from consent.
  • These conditions, as specified in the guidelines on cookies and other trackers, are:
    • To inform users of their use;
    • To give them the ability to object to their use;
    • To limit to the following purposes only:
      • audience measurement;
      • A/B testing;
    • Not to cross-check the data processed with other processing (customer files, statistics on visits to other sites, etc.);
    • To limit the scope of the tracer to a single site or application editor;
    • To truncate the last byte of the IP address;
    • To limit the lifetime of the trackers to 13 months.
  • Provided that the conditions are met, we therefore switch from an opt-in to an opt-out regime.
  • It is also possible for the same third party (subcontractor) to provide a comparative audience measurement service to multiple publishers, provided that the data is collected, processed and stored independently for each publisher and that the trackers are independent of each other.

In practice

  • Most large audience measurement offerings do not fall within the scope of the exemption, regardless of their configuration.
  • In order to benefit from this exemption, please contact your solution provider or use open source software such as Matomo that you can configure yourself.