Cookies and privacy

We do have strong beliefs about the environment.
We also have strong beliefs when it comes to protecting our visitors privacy.

Measuring our audience?

 When we started creating The giraffe and the grizzly, we quickly asked ourselves if we wanted to measure our audience. It was not so much of an easy question to answer. After discussing it, we came to the conclusion that yes, it would be helpful if we could have an idea of how many people come and visit us and how they behave on our website. When we speak about behavior, we just mean that we’d like to know if the visitor read many pages or if he just performed a touch and go.

What is the use of it?

 Let’s just be clear once and for all : we did not create The giraffe and the grizzly in order to earn money for ourselves. The reason why we created this blog is because we wanted to share our passion for wildlife and also try and help with species conservation. How shall we do that ? On the one hand by rising our readers awareness with the content we provide, and on the other hand by donating entirely all the income we can get (by selling books or pictures for instance) to conservation projects.

We have identified the need to know about the behavior of our visitors in order to be able to better calibrate the way we display our conservation message. Today’s internet makes it possible to know precisely who a visitor is, where he comes from and even where it moved it cursor on the screen. We think this kind of surveillance goes way too far. That’s why we decided to monitor only the following parameters :

• from which website or search engine did the visitor arrive ?
• which pages did he read ?
• how long did he stay on the website ?

How do we do that?

 When it comes to measuring an online audience, the easy solution is Google Analytics. As we were complete newbies when we created our first blog, that’s what we chose for Petit Parc autour du monde. But today we don’t want Google to able to track our visitors when they’re coming to our little corner of internet.

This is the reason why we have chosen Matomo as our analytics provider. This program is installed on our server and the pieces of information it gathers go directly into our database. No one else but us can access this data.

What data are we collecting?

 IP adress with its last two bits anonymized (that means that we get something like 192.168.xxx.xxx), operating system, browser, language in which it is set and screen resolution. Thanks to this data, we can get a good overview of what kind of hardware are used to visit the website (either computer, or smartphones, or tablets…). We can also have a sort of reliable indication of the country where our visitor is.

Matomo also installs a cookie. This little file helps identifying a visitor individually, with the use of a code like 72ca2ee774dc63d. This is a completely anonymous identification. It only helps us know if the person has already visited us or if this is the first time. Our aim is to know if the content we are offering is interesting enough to trigger new visits.

Be advised that if you have selected the “Do not track” option in your browser, we do respect this choice and we do not force tracking (which other website might do if they want to…)