Google Analytics vs privacy policy

If you are used to make your decision upon Google Analytics reports, you will need to know this : visitors of your website will be alerted to opt for being tracked or not. Here is the news announced in Google Analytics blog :



"As an enterprise-class web analytics solution, Google Analytics not only provides site owners with information on their website traffic and marketing effectiveness, it also does so with high regard for protecting user data privacy. Over the past year, we have been exploring ways to offer users more choice on how their data is collected by Google Analytics. We concluded that the best approach would be to develop a global browser based plug-in to allow users to opt out of being tracked by Google Analytics. Our engineers are now hard at work finalizing and testing this opt-out functionality. We look forward to make it globally available to our users in the coming weeks". Amy Chang, Group Product Manager, Google Analytics.

source : http://analytics.blogspot.com/2010/03/more-choice-for-users-browser-based-opt.html


Nevertheless, I still wonder how can online statistics interfere with privacy concerns. Currently, visitors sessions are not recorded by IP address. Moreover, GA data is agregated, there is no detailed logs like in the server-side.

Some people think that this is a strategic change, before a paid version of the tool would be included.

Anyway, note that a part of your traffic will not be taken into consideration, then figures would show trends of usage of your site rather than exact amount of visits, pageviews, etc. You will handle with samples of traffic, instead of total traffic.