How could I modify django-tracking2 so users can opt out of tracking

Question

I'm making a website right now and need to use django-tracking2 for analytics. Everything works but I would like to allow users to opt out and I haven't seen any options for that. I was thinking modifying the middleware portion may work but honestly, I don't know how to go about that yet since I haven't written middleware before.

I tried writing a script to check a cookie called no_track and if it wasn't set, I would set it to false for default tracking and if they reject, it sets no_track to True but I had no idea where to implement it (other than the middle ware, when I tried that the server told me to contact the administrator). I was thinking maybe I could use signals to prevent the user being tracked but then that would slow down the webpage since it would have to deal with preventing a new Visitor instance on each page (because it would likely keep making new instances since it would seem like a new user). Could I subclass the Visitor class and modify __init__ to do a check for the cookie and either let it save or don't.

Thanks for any answers, if I find a solution I'll edit the post or post and accept the answer just in case someone else needs this.

Answer 1

I made a function in my tools file (holds all functions used throughout the project to make my life easier) to get and set a session key. Inside the VisitorTrackingMiddleware I used the function _should_track() and placed a check that looks for the session key (after _should_track() checks that sessions is installed and before all other checks), with the check_session() function in my tools file, if it doesn't exist, the function creates it with the default of True (Track the user until they accept or reject) and returns an HttpResponse (left over from trying the cookie method).

When I used the cookie method, the firefox console said the cookie will expire so I just switched to sessions another reason is that django-tracking2 runs on it.

It seems to work very well and it didn't have a very large impact on load times, every time a request is made, that function runs and my debug tells me if it's tracking me or not and all the buttons work through AJAX. I want to run some tests to see if this does indeed work and if so, maybe I'll submit a pull request to django-tracking2 just in case someone else wants to use it.

A Big advantage to this is that you can allow users to change their minds if they want or you can reprompt at user sign up depending on if they accepted or not. with the way check_session() is set up, I can use it in template tags and class methods as well.