Do you believe in faith?
Do you have control of your life?
Let me tell you why you are here.
You’re here because you know something.
What you know you can’t explain.
But you feel it.
You felt it your entire life...
That there’s something wrong with the world.
You don’t know what it is.
But it’s there.
Like a splinter in your mind,
Driving you mad.
It is this feeling that has brought you to me.

[pause4s]

Do you know what I’m talking about?
Surveillance Capitalism is every where.
It is all around us.
Even now in this very room.
You can see it when you look at your screen.
Or when you turn on your Smart TV.
You can feel it when you go to work.
When you go out for a dinner.
When you pay your taxes.
It is your digital presence in your pockets.
Dopamin coated to blind you from the truth.
That you are a slave.
Like most of all, we were born into bondage.
Born into a prison that we cannot smell or taste or touch.
A prison for our minds.

This text was inspired from the scene in Matrix when Morpheus is about to offer Neo the pill that will wake him up.
The analogy is frightenly similar to how we are being used and harvested for our information. But instead of sleeping in the Matrix, our digital self is captured in the web.

Surveillance Capitalism

Is a theory of a novel market form and a specific logic of capitalist accumulation Shoshan Zuboff characterized it as a "radically disembedded and extractive variant of information capitalism" based on the commodification of "reality" and its transformation into behavioral data for analysis and sales.
The "Big Other", a distributed and largely uncontested new expression of power which constitutes hidden mechanisms of extraction, commodification, and control that threatens core values such as freedom, democracy, and privacy.

Read more about Surveillance Capitalism on Wikipedia.

Consumer Privacy and Data Protection

In the US the state of California was first to introduce a GDPR like legislation called the California Consumer Privacy Act(CCPA) in 2020, with an extension that will take effect in 2023, called the California Privacy Rights Act(CPRA). Two more states, Virginia and Colorado are following this example with Virginia Consumer Data Protection Act(VCDPA) and Colorado Privacy Act(CPA), both taking effect in January 1st, 2023.
Turkey and China have enforced similar laws.
So the answer to the question: Is Matomo is only for European companies? Is pretty simple, No. Anyone, any company or governmental authoritie who values core principles of data integrity and privacy has the moral duty to take ownership of their digital users so it doesn't leak to third parties. We are in the leap of a new digital era. Ethical web analasys and data integrity is spreading amongst digital users and it is only going to grow stronger. So it's time to be proactive.

Learn more about Matomo(external link).