14 DAY TRIAL // Either Germans care a whole lot about their privacy or they really have it in for Google. Most likely it's the first, but it doesn't discount from the fact that Google is getting in trouble again in the country, after the whole Street View affair, this time for Google Analytics. Several government officials in the country are threatening websites which use the service with fines if they don't stop using it without explicit consent from their visitors.
The government officials claim that services like Google Analytics which retrieve 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. The officials take issue with the fact that the websites don't make it clear to the users that their visit is being tracked and believe that the users would have to express their approval of the practice before the websites would be allowed to get the information.
According to the Zeit Online some 13 percent of German websites, over 1.8 million in total, use Google Analytics to measure traffic and visits including some big companies, political parties, and so on. The officials claim that all this information could be used by Google to create a complete profile of the users from the data gathered across different websites.
Google expectedly believes it acts well within the confines of the law and that it doesn't use the data in any way which could be tracked back to individual users. Furthermore, it also believes it has the right to process the data it gathers in its data centers in the US something that Germany has raised concerns about in the past, as well. The company believes that an explicit opt-in wouldn't benefit the users and that those concerned about their privacy can always refuse to accept the cookies which Google and other websites use to store and track information about a specific user.