DFINITY is exploring integrating an online analytics solution to monitor errors and aggregate usage data for the Internet Identity and NNS dapp.
This initiative aims to improve user experience and proactively address issues while maintaining the dapps core privacy and security principles.
The Need for Analytics
The lack of data makes it difficult to:
Detect regressions or issues introduced by new updates.
Prioritize bug fixes or feature development based on user impact.
Understand how users interact with the applications across different browsers, operating systems, and devices.
Currently, feedback is limited to support tickets and forum posts, representing only the most vocal users. This creates a biased understanding of user experiences and leaves many issues unaddressed.
Additionally, Passkeys and WebAuthn are still evolving, leading to inconsistent behaviors across platforms. Without data, it’s challenging to identify and resolve these inconsistencies effectively.
Privacy and Data Handling Requirements
To ensure the applications remain privacy-focused, any analytics tool must adhere to strict requirements:
No Cookies.
No Personal Data:
We’ll store UTM codes, referrer, country, device type, browser version, and operating system.
Click and load events will be used to monitor the usage of features.
No Individual data: The tool won’t collect data tied to any individual across sessions.
Data Location: All data will remain within the EU, where privacy laws like GDPR provide strong protections.
Compliance: The tool will comply with all relevant privacy regulations, including GDPR, PECR, and CCPA.
No Sale of Data: Data will not be sold to third parties.
Public Access: All analytics data will be made available to the community for transparency.
Community Feedback
So far, we have identified Matomo and Simple Analytics as potential solutions that meet the above requirements.
DFINITY values community input on this proposal. Your feedback will help determine which tool to use and how best to integrate it into the applications without compromising privacy.
Please join the discussion by sharing your thoughts.
I would vote against analytics, that’s how privacy violations begin. People just want the convenience of logging in with their Gmail account, nothing more.
We chose those tools because they offer the default privacy preserving features we want.
The reason behind the analytics is not to know how many people or who uses what. Instead, it’s more of a technical question: are there problems that haven’t been reported, is there good user experience in the flows and features, etc.
We intend to make the data public, so if you ever find some possible traceability, or violation of privacy, you or the community can bring it up to this forum immediately.
Will the collected analytics metrics be made public in some form?
It doesn’t have to be in real time, but since both Internet Identity and the NNS dApp are decentralized, I guess it would be beneficial to provide public data on a regular basis — even if it should be interpreted with some discretion?
Early morning thought, I was just thinking that if one of the goals is to gather data to shape the dApps according to their usage, then it would be maybe valuable for governance members and votes to have the ability to know about those information as well.
Unless, of course, sharing such aggregated metrics poses a security threat—in which case, it would absolutely make sense not to.
I was about to suggest using Plausible, I’m glad to see it was selected. You can make a dashboard public on Plausible, which is perfect for an app like the NNS!
