Thank you for your comments.

Those are very good points about the ability to opt out of the Data Sharing with Google. I wonder what the percentage is of folks who opt out of that part?

-Rudi

Interesting post – the biggest question I have been asked by clients over the last few years when suggesting Google Analytics as a measurement solution is regarding data privacy. Before the data sharing options were presented to administrators there was a common misconception that ‘anyone’ at Google would be able to use your data for marketing purposes – this was never true (though I’ll let someone from Google explain the policies in more detail).

Recently, as you’ve discovered GA now opens up data sharing services – a few points I think are important here:

1. This is optional, an administrator does not need to opt into data sharing.
2. There are types of data sharing, which opens up your GA installation to see the benchmarking services and to share conversion data with Adwords for optimisation analysis (Google needs your permission to send data to your Adwords profile).
3. Data is anonymised and based on the category of site that you declare (eg you could tell Google your blog is a gardening site and it would then benchmark you against other gardening sites.

I’ve found the benchmarking service to be a bit of a white elephant, so tend to recommend data sharing is not enabled unless data needs to be shared with Adwords.

There’s a lot of concern about using GA – one only needs to look to Germany where GA is facing legal privacy challenges because in Germany an IP address is considered PII: http://bit.ly/2fv4FB.

Cheers, James.