GDPR compliancy

Hi Fred,

Great question, and tis the season for GDPR it seems.

We don’t collect any personally identifiable information about your listeners. None of the data that SS Stats collects on your WP site is shared with or distributed to any other parties (including us at Seriously Simple Podcasting), and all of the data about podcast listenership resides just on your WP site and it’s db. The stats data is collected at the time of rerouting from the ‘podcast-download’ URL that is part of the media file route to the ultimate destination of the media file. In this rerouting step the User Agent (i.e. iTunes, Overcast, Apple Podcast app, etc.) is collected along with the count as a listen for your podcast. That’s it.

Any other questions just let us know.

Hi Craig!

Thanks for your (as usual) quick reply! I just have one extra question: how do you make the difference between listens count and listeners count then?

• This reply was modified 6 years, 6 months ago by Fred - FLQ.

Hi Fred,

We don’t have any kind of differentiation between listens and listeners. That’s just a naming convention we should update. Where are you seeing the term “Listeners” being used?

There is no IP address or other personally identifiable information that’s involved with SS Stats.

Hi Craig,

You can see it in the “Episode stats” widget for every episode in the admin:

https://lab-agito.space/special/episode_stats.png

As you can see in my example (hopefully the screenshot is displayed correctly), there is quite a difference between “Total listens” and “Total listeners”. I don’t mind having only “listens” or “listeners” but for now I’m wondering how they are differentiated. ^^;

• This reply was modified 6 years, 6 months ago by Fred - FLQ.

Hi Fred,

Just an update here regarding your question. After our tech team and I took a closer look at things it does turn out that IP address was one of the things that was captured in SS Stats along with User Agent (type of device, browser, podcasting app), and that data is stored in your DB. We’ve just pushed out an update to the plugin that anonymizes this data so that the IP address is no longer personally identifiable. This is the same practice that Google uses when anonymizing their analytics data. So once you update your site to v1.2.1 you’ll have a prompt to anonymize the existing data, which is a one time thing in your DB, and then on an ongoing basis the data is anonymized before being stored in your DB.

Sorry about the bit of confusion, but this should be everything you need in terms of GDPR and PII. If not let us know.

Craig

I have a different problem since this update…NONE of my episodes play in iTunes, Stitcher or our website. I get this error:
Fatal error: Uncaught Error: Call to undefined function ss_stats_anonymise_ip() in /home4/snakeey1/public_html/themeadhouse/wp-content/plugins/seriously-simple-stats/includes/class-ssp-stats.php:348 Stack trace: #0 /home4/snakeey1/public_html/themeadhouse/wp-includes/class-wp-hook.php(286): SSP_Stats->track_download(‘https://episode…’, Object(WP_Post), ‘new_window’) #1 /home4/snakeey1/public_html/themeadhouse/wp-includes/class-wp-hook.php(310): WP_Hook->apply_filters(”, Array) #2 /home4/snakeey1/public_html/themeadhouse/wp-includes/plugin.php(453): WP_Hook->do_action(Array) #3 /home4/snakeey1/public_html/themeadhouse/wp-content/plugins/seriously-simple-podcasting/includes/class-ssp-frontend.php(1495): do_action(‘ssp_file_downlo…’, ‘https://episode…’, Object(WP_Post), ‘new_window’) #4 /home4/snakeey1/public_html/themeadhouse/wp-includes/class-wp-hook.php(286): SSP_Frontend->download_file(Object(WP)) #5 /home4/snakeey1/public_html/themeadhouse/wp-includes/class-wp-hook.php(310): WP_Hook->apply_filters(”, Array) #6 / in /home4/snakeey1/public_html/themeadhouse/wp-content/plugins/seriously-simple-stats/includes/class-ssp-stats.php on line 348

Found the error, it was the update to the Stats plugin.

I just hacked the main plugin with

require_once( 'includes/ssp-functions.php' );

Thanks for the update there @mmarlett

We’re looking into this over the weekend and will be pushing out an update to the plugin on Monday to resolve these issues. Thanks to everyone for their help.

Craig

Hello all,

We’ve just sent out an updated release of the plugin which should resolve these issues. If not please let us know.

Craig

Hello all!

Thanks Craig for the update and the anonymizing of the DB! Makes that IP were collected for sorting out listeners and listens counts. ??

Thanks @jdwebb et @mmarlett for reporting bugs and fixes. Gonna test all that!