Following the suit of France and Austria, Italy announced banning Google Analytics from all its webmasters.
Citing a local media firm to switch away from Google Analytics soon, Italy said that a lot of identifiable data is being sent to the US without any properly anonymizing – which can let the US or other companies view the data, resulting in the violation of GDPR.
EU Dumping Google Analytics
Though Google Analytics is one of the most preferred web analytics for webmasters, there’s an increasing concern about how the service is handling the data. In this pursuit, the EU’s Court of Justice in 2020 has flagged Google Analytics under the ‘Schrems II‘.
Though Google came up with something called Privacy Shield, it didn’t satisfy the regulators on how it’s protecting the user data while transferring to the US. This led France and Austria to ban the service eventually, now being followed by Italy at the latest.
As per its announcement, Google Analytics is collecting and transferring a large amount of information (including the IP addresses) to the US through cookies. Italy doubts that there’s no proper anonymization of this sensitive data, which may let the US or other third parties see it.
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Also, there are no proper procedures for webmasters to redress any issues. All of these led Italy’s competition authority to ban Google Analytics, where it cited the example of Caffeina Media – a local web services provider to switch to using GA within 90 days.
Google’s appeals to defend these accusations were dismissed, usually, since it failed to satisfactorily demonstrate that Google Analytics can anonymize the collected user data before transmitting it to the U.S.
The company is already in the process of dumping the Universal Analytics platform – where it collects a vast amount of data through cookies. Instead, it’s pushing new webmasters to try the new Google Analytics 4, which offers similar detailed insights with less tracking. Yet, it is subjected to privacy and security concerns.
