Intellectual Property Law

Google Offers Choice to Opt Out of Web Analytics

By Ryan Singel

Google is offering a way for web users to opt out of being tracked around the web by its popular Google Analytics tool used by publishers to track traffic and trends on their websites.

Publishers like Wired.com insert a simple line of Google Analytics Javascript on their site and then can see on a dashboard which pages are popular and what search terms lead users to their site. But Google also gets much of that user information in aggregate, so it has a bird’s eye of the internet, thanks to all the sites reporting back to it. It knows more about a user’s activities across multiple sites than any individual site knows. It uses that data to improve its own services.

Google Analytics is now letting users opt out of having your information, including your IP address, sent to Google’s central servers if you install a browser plug-in for IE 7 or 8, Google Chrome and Mozilla’s Firefox. Google Analytics program manager Amy Chang described the new tool as a way to “provide even more choice and transparency for both website owners and users.”

The new choice to opt out comes just a few days after Google gave users the ability to cloak their searches from some online snoops by searching using https://www.google.com.

The opt-out utility does not block Google’s separate DoubleClick advertising cookie, which tracks you at sites around the net that use DoubleClick to show ads. You can check what Google thinks you are interested in and opt out of targeted advertising. Opting out of those will not stop Google’s display of small text ads on its sites or on other sites, because those ads are displayed, based on the content of the page you are looking at, not on your previous browsing behavior.

Additionally, opting out of Google Analytics will not prevent your IP information or search queries from being logged by the site directly or through other web analytics tools.

See Also:

• Google’s New Ad Network Knows Where You’ve Been, What You Do
• Google Seals DoubleClick Deal, Learns More About You
• Privacy Groups Want Feds to Investigate Targeted Ads
• Want Off Street View? Google Wants Your ID and a Sworn Statement

Full post as published by Threat Level on May 25, 2010 (boomark / email).