I recently jettisoned Google Analytics on my personal website and replaced Matomo (Piwik) that is hosted on my own server. However, I noticed that the Matomo control panel (where you see all of the analytics data) uses the mousemove, pointermove and scroll JavaScript event listeners for every page. These event listeners enable session recording (AKA: session reply tracking), where a record of your mouse movements on the webpage is created. At first I thought these was for an interactive component on the page, but these listeners are present on every page, even the login page and settings page. Granted, Matomo doesn’t seem to use these event listeners on the actual website it’s tracking, just the control panel.

I couldn’t find any reference to why these event listeners are there in the documentation. Does anyone know if this is actually session recording, or if it’s for some other purpose? If it is, are the recorded sessions saved locally or sent to some other company, and more importantly, can I disable it? I despise session recording as it is an extremely invasive form of tracking, and I don’t want webpages hosted on my own server to ever use it.