Is Google Analytics Removing Personal Data?
Google Analytics is now removing personal info from collected data. So far only for query term "email".
Google Analytics is now removing personal info from collected data. So far only for query term "email".
If you have a transactional site, then of course you will want your transactional and product data as measured by Google Analytics, to match the real sales numbers that your back-end system collects. However in reality, these never exactly match due to a number of issues.
I always thought that once the "general public" understood what a third-party cookie was, they would block/delete/refuse to accept them en masse. I have been predicting the demise of 3rd-party cookies since 2008, however it simply hasn't happened. But why...?
The question of data trust is what I see as the biggest issue facing the digital analytics industry at present. Why? Because it is so easy to collect junk data online. And businesses will not act on data unless they have trust in it. Is this scenario true? Take part in the Trust Survey.
My thoughts on why the Guardian and the Washington Post are barking up the wrong tree with their constant side-stories. Seriously, what is the problem with collecting and analysing meta-data?
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 use the scenario of an organisation wishing to understand the impact of traffic on their community.
Following a recent period of renewed media debate about the legality of tracking website visitors with Google Analytics, Sara Andersson, founder of Search Integration, interviewed me about my opinions and what the debate should really be about...
The Questions:
Not really! The eye catching headline form the following article is actually very misleading (I used Google translate). In fact, this is a classic example of poor/misleading journalism on this subject…
As I wrote in my last article on this subject: Google Analytics and the new EU privacy law #3, if you use Google Analytics to collect personal identifiable information (PII) without the explicit consent of each visitor, then yes you are breaking the privacy laws in each of the 27 EU member countries. That is the same with any tracking tool/methodology. It also breaks the Terms of Service of GA.
As you may be aware, last May (2011) a new EU privacy directive came into force – officially known as Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations (PECR), though often referred to as the “EU cookie law” as it implies that setting website cookies without a visitors consent would be illegal in all 27 EU member countries.
Contrary to what has been reported (and even enacted on some sites), you do not need to seek explicit consent to set an anonymous, benign first party cookie. [...]