Google to Allow Users to Opt Out of Analytics Tracking

Google has been battling privacy concerns on several accounts and things are only becoming harder as the company grows and enters new markets. Google offers some decent options for protecting your data from being gathered by the company and one method would be to avoid all Google products if you want to make sure your data stays safe. But plenty of sites use Google Analytics and, indirectly, this means that Google can still have some data on you. The company is now looking to address that and has announced a tool, coming in the next few weeks, which will enable you to opt-out of Google Analytics tracking.

"As an enterprise-class web analytics solution, Google Analytics not only provides site owners with information on their website traffic and marketing effectiveness, it also does so with high regard for protecting user data privacy," Amy Chang, group product manager at Google Analytics, wrote.

"Over the past year, we have been exploring ways to offer users more choice on how their data is collected by Google Analytics. We concluded that the best approach would be to develop a global browser based plug-in to allow users to opt out of being tracked by Google Analytics. Our engineers are now hard at work finalizing and testing this opt-out functionality," she announced.

Google Analytics is a free website traffic-tracking tool employed by quite a big number of sites. All the data is confidential and anonymized to a certain degree, but this won't calm everyone's worries. Technically, Google doesn't really have any direct responsibility, it is the third-party website's choice to implement the tool and what it decides to do with the data it gathers. This hasn't stopped some from criticizing Google and officials in Germany are particularly upset by it.

Google is rather vague on the specifics of the new opt-out tool. It says there will be a browser-based plug-in that will allow users to opt-out of Analytics tracking. But this means that they'll have to install the plug-in first, which may or may not be available for their browser of choice, something most people are going to have trouble with. Those concerned about their privacy will probably be able to handle it, though. We'll have to wait and see what Google comes up with.