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Getting a website’s privacy and consent process done right is difficult. In fact, my research shows 98% of websites get consent wrong*. Apart from the myriad of privacy decisions required to be compliant for laws such as GDPR, there are still plenty of grey areas as to what the fundamentals mean. That's how lawyers make their money of course Read more

GDPR means that organisations need to keep records of all personal data, be able to prove that consent was given, show where data is going, what its being used for, and how it is being protected. And it applies to anyone processing data on EU citizens. But what defines personal data...? And how is PII different...? Obviously name, address, telephone details etc. Read more

I am going to assume you are aware of GDPR (who isn't? And Facebook have successfully heightened the awareness in the US). You should also be aware that even though I work in the data industry, I have been a strong privacy advocate for many years now. I approach the subject as Read more

Excluding or filtering internal i.e. staff visits from Google Analytics is an interesting challenge as it's not as straightforward as you may first think. This is because there is no obvious way to identify a staff visitor... Hence this detailed post showing a possible alternative. In this article I discuss why applying a filter is flawed and suggest a quick fix Read more

The Information Commissioners Office (ICO) is the privacy watchdog in the UK. Recently they posted  their interpretation: Cookies – what does ‘good’ look like? And it's stark reading. That is, they make it quite explicit with one myth - analytics is not defined as necessary or covered under legitimate interest. From the ICO: "While we recognise that analytics can Read more

A key recommendation for GDPR compliance is to use the Google Analytics feature anonymizeIP, also known as "aip". As the name suggests, this simple switch drops the last 3 digits from your visitor's IP address. For example, if a visitor has a public ip of 215.113.40.184, then Google will obfuscate this to 217.115.40. (and all other visitor ip addresses) when it Read more

This website uses Google Analytics to help analyse how visitors use this site. Google Analytics uses “cookies”, which are small text files placed on your computer, to collect standard internet log information and visitor behaviour information in an anonymous form. Note the deliberate emphasis of anonymous, as no personally identifiable information is collected about you unless you explicitly submit that information on Read more

Online privacy is a complex subject. Hence I use this slide to neatly sum up the issue by analogy. Essentially, to illustrate the different levels of privacy, I consider the scenario of an organisation wishing to understand (i.e. gather data on) the impact of traffic on their community. In my analogy, I define: The organisation gathering the data is analogous to Read more

Tag Management Systems Panel = 3 TMS users + 1 vendor. Tag Management Systems - in my opinion the next big thing for web measurement setup (i.e. 2013), but also for the web development industry in general - deploy the necessary tracking code and program widgets across your site(s). Essentially, they are the CMS for your page tags. However, Jim made a Read more

Following a recent period of renewed media debate (I use that term loosely!) about the legality of tracking website visitors with Google Analytics, Sara Andersson, founder of Search Integration AB and the blog No Ketchup (hence the reference in my title), interviewed me about my opinions on this last week and what the debate should really be Read more