Stop using Google Analytics, warns Sweden's privacy watchdog, as it issues over $1M in fines
Stop using Google Analytics, warns Sweden's privacy watchdog, as it issues over $1M in fines
Sweden's data protection watchdog has issued a couple of fines in relation to exports of European users' data via Google Analytics.
For clarity: This relates explicitly to UA not GA4. That doesn’t however mean that the current version is deemed GDPR compliant; that is likely something that a future investigation will decide.
Google claims that GA4 should be compliant, but at the same time they have also for years until a few days ago been providing a version of GA that wasn’t.
I use a self-hosted instance of Plausible Analytics. It's privacy-respecting and the analytics data is only available the site operators, not shared to any big corp to optimize the monetization effort. And as a bonus, it's not blocked by any ad blocker so the data is more accurate.
I found this article of theirs to be shamelessly plugging: https://plausible.io/blog/google-analytics-illegal
And even though they might be good, knowing the internet today, I find myself incapable of trusting them... anything that starts off in ad-format makes me icky and unsure. It could be the best tool in the world, but I hate pitches.
PS: Yes, I know I am linking to their pitch, but I'm not the kind to hide links. Better have them all out to discuss than tucked away.
I came here to post this, glad to see this is already here.
Not only Sweden, but the other Nordics have done the same. One thing that bothers me is the clear lack of a proper alternative. On the other hand, I couldn't give two shits about Google and any of its products. So now Google Analytics is going to lose out in this market, and for what? So many companies will now go into panic mode to migrate away from GA.
We migrated to Matomo, which has very similar functionality as GA, but can be self hosted and is GDPR compatible. It can even be configured to run without consent since it doesn’t build a third party ad profile, which should actually improve the data coverage a bit.
The tracking API is a little different than GA so we had to redo some things to get all the events to trigger properly (especially for e-commerce), but for basic usage statistics it’s relatively plug and play in the tag manager.