EU Threat to Google Analytics
In the business of social media, like so much else on the Internet, we rely on web measurement and analytics to track how services are used and measure the return on investment for marketing campaigns.
Again, like so much else on the Internet, web analytics often comes head to head with privacy concerns. Should people have their movements around a website tracked, even if the information is anonymous? The EU thinks not.
Currently the Privacy and Electronic Communications directive insists that web sites using cookies have to let visitors know about the cookies and how they are used. In UK law, this simply means having a privacy policy page readily available on the web site (have you got one?).
However, a proposed new law means that cookies can only be used with explicit consent of the user, unless it is essential to the functions of the site. For most analytics packages, which rely on cookies, this means that explicit consent would need to be sought and granted by the website user before they could legally be used, possibly using a pop-up or intermediate screen. It is reasonable to expect most users would say no, meaning webmasters would be unable to accurately track usage of their content. This in turn could make it difficult to measure returns, improve the web site based on how people are using the site and make a case to advertisers.
For more information about proposed regulations, visit the Outlaw.com web site. Let us know what you think using the comment form below.
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I haven’t looked into the technical details of how Google Analytics works, but technically GA only needs one cookie per browser which will be reused for all sites using GA.
So, technically, users would need to agree to accept the one GA cookie, and not agree to the use of that cookie per website using GA.
Steven
Steven,
Thanks for your insight. That’s interesting – and would make implementation of such a law particularly complex. Would individual sites have to declare that they’re using GA’s cookie and ask approval to use it? Or, as you suggest, would a single approval to Google be sufficient.
I wonder if the whole third party cookie issue has even been considered by legislators. In any case, I would have thought that legislation is unnecessary, as all leading browsers can already be configured to disallow third party cookies like Google Analytics and even first party cookies for the ultra-paranoid.
David.