Google Analytics is now the dominant force in monitoring visitor activity on websites, providing useful information to website owners on the effectiveness of their site. Its estimated to be installed on 30% of the top million sites.
But when you are gathering and collating individual visitor information, then there are always privacy concerns. While Google is adamant that the information is secure and never shared, some people would prefer not to give that information to Google in the first place.
In the light of this, Google announced this week that it is providing a browser extension for the three most popular browsers – Internet Explorer, Firefox and Chrome that will enable users to prevent website visit information from being sent to Google Analytics.
At the same time, it provided a facility for website owners to partially anonymise the visitor IP data sent to Google Analytics by masking the last octet of the address. This gives website owners the chance to measure site traffic without having to ship complete IP addresses off to Google.
Google is leading the industry by offering these opt-outs, and it will be interesting to watch how its competitors react.
For some businesses dependent upon Google Analytics data, this announcement may cause them to question the long-term validity of their data and perhaps trigger a move to a different analytics technology which users cannot opt out of.
Time will tell.
