Germany — Search engine behemoth Google once again stomped in to strict privacy fracas in Germany. Data protection officials in Germany are warning website owners that the use of Google Analytics, the free commodity that enables website owners to derive aggregated statistics about their visitors, is once again facing a potential ban in Germany after several federal and regional government officials objected to it over data protection concerns, according to reports in national newspaper Die Zeit.
Earlier this year Google’s controversial panoramic mapping service “Street View” came under scrutiny over privacy protection in Germany, and now a group of state and federal data protection analysts are meeting on Thursday and Friday to talk about whether the use of informational tools such as Google Analytics are legal according to German law.
Several government officials in the country insist that services like Google Analytics which collects detailed usage data from the visitors of a website are illegal in the country and are now considering imposing fines of up to €50,000 for websites which use the Google service.
Google’s web analytics program can be availed for free by any website, and according to research agency Xamit it is used by around 13% of German sites. But officials argue with the fact that the websites do not make it clear to the users that their visit is being tracked and are not given the chance to opt out, the federal data protection commissioner, along with regional officials in Berlin, Hamburg, Bavaria and Schleswig-Holstein, has warned that the use of the tool could be punishable by fines of up to €50,000.
According to the weekly newspaper Die Zeit Online some 13% of German websites, more than 1.8 million in total, use Google Analytics to measure traffic and visits including some big companies, political parties, and so on. The officials maintain that all this information could be used by Google to create a complete profile of the users from the data gathered across different websites.
“We only heard from a third party that they would be meeting this week and want to issue a resolution in terms of all web analytics and web tracking software,” Google Germany’s spokesperson Kay Oberbeck told The Local on Thursday.
“They are not singling out Google Analytics, but are looking at a general resolution on all the big players in the market.”
“Without this opt-out option, it would not work,” ULD head Marit Hansen told Die Zeit.
In the mean time, Stuttgart data privacy lawyer Carsten Ulbricht quoted as saying to the paper that such data tracking without user authorization violates the country’s telecommunications policy.
But Google is convinced that its Analytics tools remain within European Union privacy laws and Oberbeck told The Local the program only aggregates anonymous user information.
“We have signed on to the Safe Harbour contract between the US and the EU, which complies with the EU’s personal data laws,” he said.
Moreover, the “opt-out” option is unessential, because Google Analytics requires all sites that use it to disclose this on their privacy policies and users can choose to reject the cookies it sends via their web browser, he added.
“What may come out of the meeting is subject to speculation,” Oberbeck said. “We do not know if they will do anything or not.”
The newspaper described that the officials are searching ways of discouraging German websites from using Google Analytics, including penalties if necessary.