Jan 13, 2011 09:34 GMT  ·  By

Google and German data protection authorities rarely see eye to eye and Google has been under the spotlight in the country for several of its products. Street View has made the most waves, but Google Analytics has been criticized as well.

Now, Hamburg's data protection commissioner Johannes Caspar, who's no stranger to conflicts with Google, is saying that talks about Analytics have been broken off, with Google's alleged refusal to cooperate, and threatening German websites using Analytics with heavy fines and levies.

The issues irking German privacy regulators have to do with Analytics' use of IP addresses to track user actions on websites. This is deemed a privacy violation since IP addresses are considered identifiable information.

Regulators want Google to make IP addresses anonymous and also give users the chance to opt out of Analytics. However, Google says that it complies with all European and German privacy laws and doesn't feel compelled to do much more.

What's more, since Analytics is provided for free and is deployed by websites rather than used by Google directly, the company believes much of the responsibility lies with the websites themselves.

However, Google now offers websites the option of using just part of the IP address for tracking, making them impossible to assign to a single user's actions.

Google also released a browser extension for those wanting to opt out of Analytics on any website. But regulators complain that the extension is not available for Safari and Opera, so about 10 percent of German users don't have access to it.

German officials now claim that negotiations have been broken off and are contemplating introducing levies and fines for German companies using Analytics, since Google itself cannot be held liable under local law. Google says its not aware of a meltdown in talks and that it continues to work with officials.

Google and German data protection officials have quite a history. For a long time, regulators grilled Google about Street View. This lead to Google doing a full review of its software which uncovered that it had been, inadvertently it claims, collecting payload WiFi data from open networks which lead to several investigations, some still ongoing, in countries where Street View had been deployed.