User opt-out option for Google Analytics on the way

google analytics

[Mohamed]

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. [analytics.blogspot.com ]

What does this mean for you?
For me, I don't really see the point of having GA in my site.

[Swanny007]

Well it's "opt out" so 99.9% of the Internet population won't know or care about this plugin.

What does it mean to me? It means I will take advantage of it but I suspect it will impact my GA reports very little, if at all. But my visitors are not techies. I've only got GA on two sites at the moment, am contemplating dropping them altogether for privacy purposes. But that's another thread ;-)

[tangor]

tedster, correctly, forwarded [webmasterworld.com...] to this thread. That post has some additional off site commentary which might be of interest.

The only way I see this going down is a revisit of the oft debated argument regarding opt-in v opt-out... and that google is default opt-in...

[tedster]

Good point tangor - let's include that link in this thread, too, along with some of the market share data:

Mountain View promises Google Analytics opt-out
Another privacy tool few will ever use [theregister.co.uk]

According to a study from the University of California, Berkeley, Google Analytics was used on 71 per cent of roughly 400,000 top domains as of March 2009. This same study showed that Google AdSense was used by over 35 per cent of the top domains and Google DoubleClick by over 26 per cent.

Taken together, Google-controlled web bugs were tracking users on 92 of the net's top 100 sites and about 88 per cent of almost 400,000 others.

There's a growing amount of conjecture around the web about why Google is doing this. Are they trying to get out in front of privacy legislation? Are they paving the way for a new form of Analytics that they are developing -- or perhaps plan to acquire? Will adoption of this plug-in significantly compromise Adwords or DoubleClick data? It's all guesswork right now.

[tangor]

I can envision the EU forcing Google to display a choice screen for opting either in or out of their many services, including personal tracking. This plug-in might be preparation for a tool... or merely PR on their part. If it is adopted by the masses the reliability of Analytics will be seriously compromised.