paris.fr

Context

paris.fr is the official website of the City of Paris’s municipal government (Ville de Paris). It publishes municipal news, services for residents, and Paris Council materials. Controller: Ville de Paris. Privacy policy of roughly 26,500 characters. Measurement: 38 requests, all domains belonging to paris.fr, captured on a clean browser.

Declared versus actual

The policy directly names its audience-measurement tool — Matomo — and states a key detail: the program is “installée sur nos serveurs,” meaning it is deployed on the city’s own servers. Matomo cookies (pk, NSC_, MATOMO_) are listed, and the processing is described as audience measurement (visitor counts, average visit duration, page views) with data anonymization.

The measurement fully confirms this. All requests go to paris.fr domains: the site itself, the proprietary cdn.paris.fr, and the proprietary subdomain matomo.apps.paris.fr, where Matomo is hosted (lighttpd server, IP within paris.fr’s address space). The Matomo script and its container (Matomo Tag Manager, likewise self-hosted rather than a third-party tag manager) load from this subdomain. The audience beacon transmits the standard set — page title, URL, referrer, visitor identifier, and display parameters — to that same proprietary server. Not a single cookie is set for the entire session. No third-party trackers, advertising pixels, CNAME masking, or data transfer to external recipients are recorded.

Timing relative to consent

The Matomo script loads at +106 ms, and the beacon fires at +129 ms. For audience measurement on proprietary servers configured per CNIL recommendations, consent is not required; the correct mechanism is opt-out. Firing before any explicit choice is consistent with the declared model.

What cannot be claimed from the measurement

The measurement covers the homepage. Full compliance of Matomo’s configuration with all conditions of the CNIL exemption (IP truncation, retention period) cannot be fully verified from a single browser measurement; what is recorded is that the transmitted dataset matches standard audience measurement on proprietary infrastructure, with no signs of advertising profiling or third-party transfer. Server-side processing is not visible in a browser-based measurement.

Conclusion

The City of Paris implements audience measurement exemplarily in terms of hosting: Matomo is deployed on the city’s own subdomain, which the policy directly and precisely describes as “installé sur nos serveurs.” There are no external domains, third-party trackers, advertising, or data transfer outside paris.fr’s infrastructure in the measurement; no cookies are set. What is declared in the policy fully matches what is actually observed. No violations recorded.