I've read a lot of comments recently about how Google Analytics is bad, but no one explain why. Can I ask why this is not something people want? Is it not anonymised?
GA gives Google surveillance over a large portion of the web. Even if the author of a webpage trusts google with their data, they shouldn't be forcing their opinion of Google on others. Trust isn't transitive!
Google receiving browsing histories for a single website is rude, but it probably isn't a serious problem for many websites (although the risk will depend on the nature of the website). In isolation, the fact that Alice read Bob's webpage isn't isn't very interesting, but Google can aggregate that data into s very accurate pattern of life[1].
> Is it not anonymised?
Not for any meaningful definition of "anonyms". At best GA will zero the low 8 bits of the IP address by request of the website. (The opinion of the person visiting the website apparently isn't worth considering) See this[2] post for a more detailed explanation of GA's perfunctory "Anonymize IP" feature.
One reason why is that Google Analytics is not being limited to giving the web site owner traffic information, the analytics are also being used by Google to collect and correlate larger traffic patterns, as well as track individual users across multiple sites. These are things Google gets to see, but the neither the site owners nor the users have access to. What Google does exactly with this information is not entirely known outside of Google, though it's certainly used at least to improve personalized advertising, which many people feel is a privacy concern.
When a company with the reach and market share of Google is involved, "anonymized" is meaningless. They have so many other channels to gather data (Android, ReCaptcha, Chrome, Google Search, etc.) that I'm sure it's trivial to de-anonymize and correlate GA data to a real person if that becomes profitable/necessary.
It's anonymized to the website owner (who has your IP anyway), not to Google. That means even non-Chrome users are forced under Google's omniscient watch of the web.
pdkl95|6 years ago
Google receiving browsing histories for a single website is rude, but it probably isn't a serious problem for many websites (although the risk will depend on the nature of the website). In isolation, the fact that Alice read Bob's webpage isn't isn't very interesting, but Google can aggregate that data into s very accurate pattern of life[1].
> Is it not anonymised?
Not for any meaningful definition of "anonyms". At best GA will zero the low 8 bits of the IP address by request of the website. (The opinion of the person visiting the website apparently isn't worth considering) See this[2] post for a more detailed explanation of GA's perfunctory "Anonymize IP" feature.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pattern-of-life_analysis
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15167059
dahart|6 years ago
andai|6 years ago
AlexandrB|6 years ago
leppr|6 years ago
JohnFen|6 years ago
I block it because the data it collects is none of Google's business. Being "anonymized" doesn't make it any better.
CamperBob2|6 years ago