Google Analytics – Giving Users Choice to NOT be Tracked

Announced yesterday, Google announced on their blog that they might be making the move to give users a browser wide option to disable tracking of their behavior on websites that have Google Analytics.

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.

Read the blog post from Google here.

Google is all about it’s users first, at the cost of advertisers and marketers.  This is a great tool for marketers, but if it diminishes the perceived value and experience of a user, it appears Google is willing to remove the value of the tool to marketers in order to remain congruent with it’s philosophies for it’s users.

Google believes in their motto “Don’t be Evil”.  I guess this means to them that their users want control and don’t want to be tracked.  On the other hand, their entire business model is delivering information to marketers, better than their competitors.  This is a very tough balancing act.

Fortunately there are other options for us marketers for tracking.  However I don’t like that I might be moving away from such a powerful tool.  As far as ‘don’t be evil’, I’ll argue that every piece of information we collect is entirely to help us increase visitor value.  Following the fundamental principals of marketing, just like Google, and putting the users first should always put a business ahead.  Therefore, this move just might hurt us ethical marketers in an effort to rid the web of those that use information for self interest.

This is something that will be released in weeks.

I don’t think this will ultimately get us to change.  I think this is a political move on Google’s part, anticipating that a small percentage of the population will use this feature.  This means, from a statistical perspective, that our data will be skewed, however not enough to sway the data enough to change our business decisions.  This feature might be quietly released, being there, but not highly promoted.  I just can’t see Google making a move to deter us marketers from recommending Google Analytics on our client’s site.