Google, Yahoo! Analytics: Privacy, Data Ownership, Data Expiration

By Phil Kemelor (@philkemelor) Dec 2, 2010

With the U.S. Office of Management and Budget providing a framework for enabling the use of persistent cookies for web site measurement (see post on New OMB Guidance for details) there is lots of interest among federal web managers and communications staff in using Google Analytics (GA) and Yahoo! Analytics (YWA) — the predominant "no cost" web analytics solutions on the market.

At the same time, I hear lots of hesitancy about using the solutions because of concerns and questions about:

Whether Google Analytics and Yahoo! Analytics use analytics data for marketing
Their data collection opt out policies for both site visitors and site owners
Data ownership

If you’re in the private or non-profit sectors and are considering using these solutions, or currently using GA or YWA, you should know that both solutions have recently modified their privacy policies and opt-out capabilities to address the increasing concern about site visitor control over their data.

What I find interesting about the GA and YWA options is the paths each company has taken over the last year. I think they are quite divergent, and they may reflect business goals that go well beyond the sphere of web analytics.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics provides you with a number of options for controlling data, and the acceptance of Google Analytics among site visitors. In fact, as a site owner, you will need to think about the options you’d like to present to visitors. Google is becoming increasingly interested in addressing privacy issues raised in the US and Europe and the promotion of control over data is one avenue that they are taking.

Using Data for Marketing

GA provides options that are fairly nuanced, so you really need to consider what each one provides.

Data Sharing: When we think about sharing data, concerns often focus on the issue of “I don’t want my site’s visitor information given to Google for their marketing efforts” or “I don’t want my site’s visitor information going to a third party for their marketing efforts.”GA covers this pretty well. If you go to your Account Settings, you can choose how you want your data shared, if at all.

GA covers this pretty well. If you go to your Account Settings, you can choose how you want your data shared, if at all. Selecting “Do not share my Google Analytics data” effectively prevents Google from using the data for marketing purposes.
Opt Out: Personally, I’d always recommend to your site visitors that if they don’t want to be tracked on your site, then direct them to manage this through their browser settings. However, if you want to give them another path, you can direct them to download a GA plug in that will disable GA tracking on any site they visit…not just yours. While this may be a civic-minded option to offer, I don’t endorse it because you’re encouraging visitors not to be tracked. I wrote about this in some detail in an earlier blog post. You can check out the plug-in here. I affectionately call this the Nuclear Option.

Anonymize IP: GA already obscures IP addresses so that you cannot report on visitor level data.Now, you can further anonymize IP addresses through the addition of additional code to your GA tag. This will remove the last octet of the IP address prior to its storage, and slightly reduce the accuracy of geographic reporting, according to Google.

Just keep in mind that these options apply to your site visitors and the data you collect on their activities. They don’t apply to you, the GA account owner.