How does Google Analytics affect the privacy of your audience? That's a good question to ask, not least because there may be legal implications to the answer.
In the first part of this series I looked at where the data on audience members goes. In this part I look at something more basic: what the data is.
As before there is a distinction between what Google know about a member of your audience, and what they let you know about that person. In this case I'm focusing on the latter, because it's hard to know the former (that is true of many companies, not just Google).
Audience privacy all depends on how Google Analytics is set up.
Google Signals
You know the most about website visitors if you've enabled Google Signals in your Google Analytics (GA) settings. In that case GA will pull info about the audience from the Google accounts they use for their Android phones, their Gmail, their Google Docs, etc. But this only happens if they are logged in at the time of visiting your website, and using the same device.
Of course, a website visitor may use an iPhone, or a Yahoo email address or Microsoft Word. They may not even have a Google account. In that case, turning on Google Signals will not reveal any more information about them.
When Google Signals is turned on, you see this information about your audience:
- Age
- Gender
- Interests - for example: 'Food & Dining/Cooking Enthusiasts/Aspiring Chefs'
For quieter websites, thresholding may hide this data about some audience members. I haven't done any testing around that functionality, so I'm unclear how effective it is.
If you don't enable Google Signals, you'll find the fields listed above are empty in GA:
Granular location
Have you enabled Granular location and device data collection in the GA property? If so, then GA will store the city of website visitors. They label this 'city', and it can be that. But, it can also be a much smaller entity. For example, I've seen a UK village listed which has a population of 6,000.
So, where a user lives affects how much privacy they are afforded by Google Analytics. Or does it? I say that because city seems to correspond to the location given by the Internet Service Provider (ISP) of the audience member. I've seen ISPs describe location accurately. I've also seen them give a location 30 miles away from the actual location of the user.
Data stored as standard
If neither of the above settings is enabled, then Google will show this information about visitors to your website:
- Region (for example Florida )
- Country
- Language
Data inferred from user actions
It might be possible to learn about a website visitor from their actions. A website visitor who visits a page designed for gambling addicts may be a gambling addict. Or they might just be interested in the subject.
You might have shared a page address with only a small group of people, and it may not be possible to get there without having the page address. In that case you would know that website visitors are one of that small group.
Can you identify a website visitor?
In most cases it's not possible for you to identify an audience member. However, if a website has a low level of traffic it is possible to make an educated guess in combination with other information.
Here's an example: imagine Murali is someone you met at an event last month. He said he was from Market Harborough in Leicestershire, UK. You check your stats this month and you see that you've had a visitor from Market Harborough. Is that the same person?
If your website is quiet - say you get 100 visitors a month and only 5 are from the UK - then it's very likely to be the same person. But if you get 10,000 visitors a month from the UK, then you couldn't say that.
Either way you could never prove it was Murali who visited.
More Google Analytics posts
Privacy part 1 - where the data goes in Google Analytics 4
Can Google Analytics give an early warning of going viral?
