Mountain View, California — In a move to cool down growing concerns about privacy, Google on Tuesday unveiled a novel concept for web users who are interested in avoiding its popular “Google Analytics” tool used by publishers to track traffic and trends on their websites can now easily do so thanks to Google itself.
“Even though Google Analytics does not disclose any personal information, we believe in offering user more option and control whenever possible,” Will DeVries, policy counsel at Google, wrote in a blog post. “This means the information from your visit will not be sent to Google Analytics or included in its reports.”
This afternoon, the company rolled out a beta version of the Google Analytics Opt-out Browser Add-on, which halts the program from tracking online behavior. The add-on is currently in beta mode and available for Internet Explorer, Firefox and Google’s own browser, Chrome.
For example, website like Wired.com embed a simple line of Google Analytics Javascript code on their site and then can view on a dashboard which pages are popular and what search terms lead users to their site. But Google also accumulates much of that user information collectively, so it has a broad view of the internet, thanks to all the sites reporting back to it. It knows more about a user’s activities across multiple sites than any individual site knows. It uses that data to improve its own services.
Google Analytics is now empowering users opt out of having your information, including your IP address, sent to Google’s central servers if you install a browser plug-in for IE 7 or 8, Google Chrome and Mozilla’s Firefox. Google Analytics program manager Amy Chang described the new tool as a way to “provide even more choice and transparency for both website owners and users.”
This is not the first time Google is offering such tools to users to control how much of their information is collected online. The company’s Ads Preferences Manager allows users to add or subtract from the list of interests that Google associates with their computer, controlling what ads appear as they browse. Google also offers a plug-in that allows users to opt out of its DoubleClick advertising cookie.
The new choice to opt out comes barely few days after Google empowered users the ability to mask their searches from some online snoops by searching using https://www.google.com.
Google Analytics, which made its first appearance in November 2005, enables Web site owners track the traffic coming to their sites.
“Like traffic pattern reports tell you about traffic on a highway or street, Google Analytics provides general trends for a Web site (numbers of visitors, average time spent on one page) without revealing any personally identifiable information,”DeVries wrote.
These are remarkable steps on Google’s part and are sure to score points with privacy advocates, the impact on publishers, many of whom depend on data from Analytics to optimize their sites’ performance, will depend on how many people choose to install the plug-in. Because Analytics tracks Web surfers around the world, presumably millions of people would have to opt out in order to have any sizable impact.
Access the opt-out beta here.