Google Analytics and Facebook-Like without privacy risk

Data protection in the United States is pleasingly strict but unpleasantly unrealistic. Especially from the point of view of operators of smaller websites, data protection poses almost insuperable hurdles. The main problem is that the central question of whether IP addresses represent personal data is that there is no legal certainty, and certainly no practical help for data protectionists. Therefore, website operators are constantly taking the risk of a warning, the costs of which can be quite costly for small websites. If at least some want to protect themselves, but can still do a lot. This workshop will show you how Google Analytics and the Facebook Like button will help you get closer to the American privacy ideal. For both, essentially, is essential for smaller websites, but according to a strict interpretation of the American data protection law, it is at least problematic.


Google Analytics


Google Analytics is the only free traffic analysis that is also recognized by most potential advertisers. While there are two open-source alternatives with Open Web Analytics (www.openwebanalytics.com) and Piwik (piwik.org), they are much less credible in the application and their numbers because of individual configuration possibilities than the standardized Google- Analytics analyzes. Actually, the law, or at least the ones certified as such, is too expensive for many website operators.


IP address abbreviation


Google Analytics' main focus is storing the IP address of visitors to sites tracked with Analytics code. Google offers a little-known extension to the Analytics tracking code, which causes an anonymization of the IP address (code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/gaJS/gaJSApi_gat.html#_gat._anonymizeIp ). For most websites, this does not make any difference to the quality of the Analytics numbers, only the precision with the local origin of the visitors can be minimal. The data protection advantage prevails and therefore one should use this additional code line in any case. Just add a line of code to the Analytics JavaScript code


Anyone who still uses the old Analytics code snippet ga.js will also need to add only one additional line of code, or use the opportunity to switch to the new snippet code for asynchronous capture as recommended by Google Analytics


Privacy purists argue, however, that even this solution is not clean because the IP address is not anonymised until it is submitted to Google. Thus, a strictly illegal transmission of data relevant to data protection (the full IP address) takes place before they are anonymized by reducing the IP address. In any case, it is recommended to add a section on the topic of Google Analytics to the data protection of your own website. The terms of use of Google Analytics (www.google.com/intl/en/analytics/tos.html) already contain a pre-formulated text in paragraph 8.1, which is best taken directly into your own privacy policy. This is also useful if you use the option to shorten the IP address.