Fair point. I am not a heavy GA user, I just use the basic functionality.
Nevertheless, I don't feel iffy about my Interests profile participating in aggregate data available to the sites I visit. Since virtually all sites are free of charge, giving some of that insight back seems like a fair trade.
That said, having ALL that data available to Google without anonymization is a bit more worrying, although I haven't seen many examples where it hurt someone in real world.
There is a very good reason why GA is free to use. It involves building profiles of your users for Google's benefit. Don't be surprised or upset if some of your users don't want to participate in that privacy shit storm.
You are so desperate to justify your thinking (not to me, mind you, to yourself) that you grasp for every straw possible, forgetting what the question was about along the way.
This particular question was about how you formed your opinion about Google using GA data to build advertising profiles. My opinion is formed based on my expertise in mining many terabytes of data and my experience in sourcing this data. Based on that experience I can say that GA data is not of interest to google because it is unreliable and they have better data already. Even if it was, they would have to stop themselves because it is just too damn risky (bankruptcy level risk) to use it.
So my opinion stems from my experience in this very business. And your opinion stems from where exactly? This is what I'm trying to show you. You have 0 idea what you are talking about but insist that you are right. Even further, you outright accuse google of lying when they say GA data is not used unless the webmaster explicitly opts in to share it. Why do they have that control in first place then?
Oh and btw, that quote about relevant search results and ads... you might want to check where it comes from before basing arguments off it. You know, if you want to have a coherent argument and not some tin foil conspiracy theory grasping desperately for whatever it can catch. Checking facts is a good thing, don't you agree?
Anyway, you will either admit it to yourself tomorrow, or you won't. I don't particularly care. I just wanted to see how far you will go in your justification attempt. Remember that just because you are allowed to have an opinion does not mean you must have one.
Web analyst here, not Google employee although I put bread on the table with GA.
I am reasonably confident that Google does not dip into GA data for its own purposes, unless you go out of your way to enable Advertising Features. Google disclaims ownership and controller-ship of the data collected by GA. This is a contract to its users, as well as the cornerstone of Google's plan to not get fined into the mantle of the earth via GDPR.
There are valid reasons to avoid Google Analytics, including privacy ones. But the idea that Google uses GA data for profiling is overblown (again, aside from Advertising Features, which establishes a connection between GA data and advertising data). It has plenty of other sources for personal browsing data, and those other sources are more reliable.
And since this always comes up: Google gives GA away for free because it's a strategic compliment to online advertising. If people can see how much ROI they get from AdWords, they spend more on AdWords. It's that simple. Google does not need to dip into the GA data in order to see a massive return.
But trusting companies to do the right thing is untenable. That trust has been broken far too often, by far too many companies. The only rational position a concerned user can take is to assume that anybody collecting such sensitive information (particularly in a sneaky way) intends to monetize it or use it for purposes other than product improvement.
And even if the data really will only be used for product development, getting the user's informed consent -- and refraining from data collection without it -- is critical.
Further, using GA automatically means that the data is being used for Google's purposes as well as the application creator's.
GA gives Google surveillance over a large portion of the web. Even if the author of a webpage trusts google with their data, they shouldn't be forcing their opinion of Google on others. Trust isn't transitive!
Google receiving browsing histories for a single website is rude, but it probably isn't a serious problem for many websites (although the risk will depend on the nature of the website). In isolation, the fact that Alice read Bob's webpage isn't isn't very interesting, but Google can aggregate that data into s very accurate pattern of life[1].
> Is it not anonymised?
Not for any meaningful definition of "anonyms". At best GA will zero the low 8 bits of the IP address by request of the website. (The opinion of the person visiting the website apparently isn't worth considering) See this[2] post for a more detailed explanation of GA's perfunctory "Anonymize IP" feature.
This has gone full circle and honestly is quite irritating at this point.
People say that Google uses GA data for advertising, I say that this is not the case and then you just chose to ignore that. So I'm just gonna ask directly - can you show some evidence suggesting Google uses GA data for building advertising profiles or did you pull this opinion out of your ass?
Because as someone who analyses marketing and advertising data, I can tell you that I strongly believe they do not use GA data in this way. 1) They have no need to, they have better data; 2) This data is unreliable; 3) GA prohibits the use of personally identifiable information; and most important of all:
THE WEBMASTER CAN CHOSE TO NOT SHARE IT WITH THEM. If this webmaster went out of his way to tell google not to store IP information, I think it is pretty safe to assume that they did not opt-in to share the data with google AT ALL.
Apart from these technical reasons, using GA data in the way you think they do opens a regulatory risk of EPIC proportions.
But if you have some evidence to suggest that they do use it for "advertising profiles", please do share it. But if you can't and you formed this opinion because you are prejudiced, I would like to see you admitting it.
Actually, GA only provides you with a [meager] subset of the data that Google gathers. Now it's their data.. not yours, and not your customers. They won't even give up IP addresses so that you can check it against your own logs.
If not using GA doesnt affect your page rank, I don't see why Google would need (or even want) to be secretive about it. Only if it does hurt your ranking (how is that huge antitrust lawsuit today feeling Big G??) will they need to be all secretive about it.
Yes! I find it so hypocritical of people who seems to be extra careful about their personal information. I understand this makes sense for some people, but for most of the others, Google using your meta-data to show things which might interest you and by also helping you with great applications is cool. Not everyone wants to pay for things to get privacy.
I agree partly with you but I don't think most users know the extend of information collected from those services, if people saw their profiles as really used by google I believe almost all of them would freak out.
Eh, I guarantee you that the creators get less detail than Google has. Anonymized aggregate stats are a far cry from the individual profile Google builds of you.
That's curious, because I was just at a talk by Alma Whitten who said that Google didn't use any of the GA data for profiling or ad-related stuff, and simply provided it as a service. Did I misunderstand her, or, possibly, you?
I think there's value in at least distributing the data that's collected. I may not like that the analytics provider has my data, but it seems like a lesser evil if that provider isn't also the world's largest ad company and they aren't using it to build profiles behind the scenes to track my every move across a significant part of the Internet.
Given the choice between a lot of data about me given to a small provider and somewhat less data about me given to Google, I'd generally choose the former.
I disagree, just slapping GA on websites is shady shit. Not because the individual webmaster is doing shady stuff with that data but because this gives Google a ridiculous amount of data.
It does not compromise the user's privacy in any way. GA prohibits PII. Also, the webmaster has to opt-in to share the data with Google in the first place.
The article said they're making some attempt to anonymize the data. Anyhow whether that's wholly true or not, I don't like google having the data either. However, I do get that it's fair on some level since I'm directly using their service and it's been always apparent they monetize it through the data we inherently give them.
Where marketing and private intelligence bothers me is when it's not obvious to consumers when they're providing data. And also it's not always expected the ways in which it's used. And in the increasingly interconnected world of marketers selling and sharing data, the full implications won't be realized for some time.
edit:
Recently it's bothered me more and more that the software world tries to find hidden ways to charge users. It would be like highway construction companies tracking traffic patterns by embedding data sensors in their roads to collect consumer data and while they're at it, share it with the government to win some favors. Or like your carpenter going ahead and embedding sensors into the drywall to collect your data to resell and help them generate more revenue. People have paid for stuff directly for a long time and been happy to. But internet companies have this thirst to get millions of users by offering something for free, gambling investor dollars, and hope it pays off huge (which it occasionally does).
I find this to be more of a PR stunt that says "Google tries to care about privacy..."
With every change they make to Google search, they put more value on a site's user experience. Now they take away data that is used to improve user experience... smh
If GA users are abiding by their terms and not collecting private info, why is this necessary? Punish all b/c we don't feel like investigating who is actually wronfully collecting private info?
That's the thing, I highly doubt the majority of users are even aware of how much information Google has on its users. Even I as a knowledgeable programmer would probably be surprised at the depth of profiling they have done. And this isn't even considering any sort of machine learning analysis of the data that to extrapolate information not explicitly given. So no, "willingly allow them" is not an accurate description of the relationship.
Nevertheless, I don't feel iffy about my Interests profile participating in aggregate data available to the sites I visit. Since virtually all sites are free of charge, giving some of that insight back seems like a fair trade.
That said, having ALL that data available to Google without anonymization is a bit more worrying, although I haven't seen many examples where it hurt someone in real world.
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