The application, Google Analytics, is used by various online websites and businesses to track different ports of information:
- You can track your advertising projects to see how well they’re doing and to determine your investment return from them.
- You can track your social networking sites interaction to see how you’re faring as it compares to the time and energy that you spend managing the different systems.
- You can choose the best, most suitable keywords for your marketing campaigns and track how well each word or phrase does in drawing in traffic.
The application is very adept in helping businesses design a marketing campaign that best suits their goals and the best way to gain profits. The analytics program does track information that relates to individual demorgraphics, and for some entities, this has become a slight problem.
Germany’s government recently banned Google Analytics from being used by website owners and companies. The reason? The government claims that these entities tracking IP addresses from individuals is a direct violation of privacy. The service tracks website traffic and collects information about the visitors to pages including their location, from what location they came to a particular site and the length of time they spend on the site.
Banning the application from use was recently invoked, and any company who is found in violation of that ban stands to face extremely large penalties and fines. This change comes on the heels of another action that Google incurred in October 2010 in relation to a geo-tracking system that was being used. The service called Street View Mapping was forced by the German government to blur out properties in particular within the application, blocking it from being seen by users. This change of guidelines in tracking will cause a challenge with German online businesses.
Jen Williams
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thank you for your article. I read it because I have some interest in germany – I studied the language and I do post links on german websites sometimes. I have a hard time figuring out how germany, which is the closest to a police state can be more mindful of its citizens’ privacy than america which is the champion of freedom. just chiming in.
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You state “Germany’s government recently banned Google Analytics from being used by website owners and companies”. Is there any reference to an official document on this.
I’m German and I’m not aware of this.
Here is one: http://eu.techcrunch.com/2009/11/24/google-analytics-illegal-germany/
Thanks for your reply. This explains a lot. The German text linked in the techcrunch post is full of “could”, “think”, “might”. This is an ongoing discussion about privacy. If those government officials cited where confident about their point of view they had to act – they don’t – they talk.