Is Google Analytics Invading Us or Protecting Us?
I am on the fence on this one. Analytics has proven itself. We need it to
discover trends, what’s working, what’s not working, and to learn more about
our audience and how our customer behaves, acts, and reacts. But is all of this
at a cost to our privacy and security? Yes, of course. But if you choose to be
on the internet in any fashion, I suppose you are inviting an invasion of
privacy into your life.
When Google started serving up ads,
no one was the least bit surprised. It made sense. What company isn’t looking
for the next big way to grow revenue and profits? But Google has something most
companies do not have: everyone’s attention, daily.
It all began with Google tracking
who clicked what ads. You could opt out, of course, but then you’d just get a
bunch of ads you could care less about, so most people just deal with the ads.
At least they might find a needle in a haystack one day if it is ads for things
of ‘interest’. Everything you click on Google goes into your ‘interest’ profile(Gawker.com, 2009).
Funny thing is, when Google (and
others like Yahoo) introduced this whole ad serving thing, they knew to make it
clear there was an opt-out option, yet barely more than 1% of users even bother
to visit the users ad-preference page (Gawker.com, 2009), which is exactly what
Google could hope for.
Personally,
I think Gawker.com writer Owen Thomas nailed it when he so boldly, yet
accurately stated, “The truth is that privacy is a problem everyone likes to
talk about in public, and no one actually bothers with in private. It's a handy
bugaboo for activist groups, a reliable topic for pundits and journalists. A
trendy thing, perhaps, to whine about in online message boards. But is it
relevant to our online lives today? In an age of oversharing, when we update
Facebook with every emotion and Twitter every Web page we come across, when we
blog, blog, blog it all, is Google really the biggest threat — or is it us(Gawker.com, 2009)?’
What
with all the privacy invasion? Well, think about how the internet originated.
It was developed by the ‘Defense Advanced Research
Projects Agency (DARPA) as a way to send military and intelligence messages
during wartime (later widely deployed by academics), the massive popularity of
the Internet has largely been driven by commerce, advertising, data-collection,and analytics (clikz.com, 2014).’ So, it was developed as a part of military
strategy. Well, with that in mind, no one should be that shocked that the
internet is invading civilian privacy, when it was built to invade military
intelligence. Collecting data in one form or another has been at the root of
the internet from its infancy.
The scary part is that most people
don’t realize that their most personal information is collected while they
browse websites they enjoy, whether for information or shopping.
Simply knowing our buying habits,
what brands we prefer, the websites we browse and the types of products we are
in the market for aren’t actually all that frightening. That seems like typical
marketing data that could be just as easily (yet much more time-consuming)
gained by market research done in a physical environment, or by focus groups,
or online or direct marketing research surveys. Not really a big deal. Something
we’re used to. We could mostly care less if someone knows you prefer Coke to
Pepsi or a cruise versus an all-one tropical destination vacation. But with the
rapid rate of technological advances and marketing applications as well as
analytical tools, it has become so much more than that.
As Rand Schulman from Clikz.com
states (in regards to the internet), ‘We all use it and many believe that it is
foundational to the quality of our lives. We give up privacy to own cars
(driver's license) and have electricity (utilities track our energy usage).
Maybe we shouldn't have cars and electricity either? Where is that inflectionpoint? (Clickz.com, 2014).
How much do we care is known about
us on the internet? What is it that we really fear? Any financial information
or personal governmental information is always encrypted, so whey do we care
about the rest? Well, it depends what worries you. If you are parents and have
several pedifiles registered in your area, then yes, photos of your children
with their location is certainly a concern. If you have several financial
accounts with different brokers, you might not be interested in that being
public information. If you have college accounts or savings accounts for your
kids, you probably don’t want that known. If you plan to be out of town, you definitely
aren’t interested in random strangers having access to the fact that no one
will be watching your home. And those are just a few of the many, many examples
of things we might prefer to remain private.
Particularly interesting is what was
exclaimed by Simon Schmid of Iubenda.com. He wrote that ‘researched a similar question based
on Google Analytics, AdSense and AdWords and what it found was that:
- More than 90% were breaking at least one of Google’s policies
- More than 65% were breaking at least two of Google’s policies
- More than 40% were breaking at least three of Google’s policies
Most
people on the web rely on some service provided by Google, but many ultimately
fail to comply with Google's terms for those services: they do not have a
privacy policy and those who do regularly fail to bundle the relevant
information into it. Below is an overview over some of Google's popular web
products that you probably use and the exact section in their ToS detailing
the requirements for you to use a privacy policy (Iubenda.com, 2013).’ That is
tough for me to even get my head around. People don’t even know they are
breaking the policy, yet Google takes advantage of the data regardless, since
they offered the opt our and preferences and it must not be ‘their fault’ if we
aren’t doing as we are supposed to do as users.
Ads, hosting, traffic, monitoring,
videos, feed readers, email, searching: with a tool that covers the entire gamut,
how do we expect them not to have everything on us when we freely browse the
web without the slightest thought of all that is being captured about our
lives? The truth is, most users and consumers either aren’t interested in
analytics, or don’t even know about it. It’s a ghost, some invisible force, a
foreign language. So, therefore, they don’t worry about it. They just carry
about their lives searching away on a free and public internet.
Google Analytics is both a necessity
and a crutch. As a marketer, I think it’s great. We need it to be successful
and understand our audience, and whether consumers know it or not, their lives
are better off and information they truly want is directed to them with this
kind of data analytics. However, maybe where the whole system is lacking, is
ensuring consumers and website users truly understand their privacy rights and
how to set their preferences in order to keep the stuff they really want
private, truly private.
References:
How Google Will Invade Your
Privacy While 'Protecting' It. Thomas, Owen. Gawker.com,
2009. Retrieved from http://gawker.com/5168177/how-google-will-invade-your-privacy-while-protecting-it.
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