Google Analytics’ German troubles

The German data protection representative Johannes Caspar has made it public that Google’s negotiation with the federal authorities about the future of its web measurement application Google Analytics (GA) in Germany have reached a dead end. After long months of bickering, the sides have failed to reach agreement on what adjustments the American Internet giant has to make to comply with the country’s rigorous privacy laws. It is a setback for Google and its expansion plans, but the fallout from the inability to find common ground is going to be felt most strongly by GA users in Germany. Caspar revealed that website operators who stick with the application may be looking at hefty administrative fines.

Speaking for the German daily “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung”, he said,

Unfortunately, we concluded that Google has not met our data protection requirements. What Google offers does not fit. [the German legal system]

The European Union’s largest economy is more sensitive than other countries in its approach to individual privacy, stretching a protective hand over consumers by advancing a rigorous legal framework for businesses which transfer and process this sort of information.

Google is not the first and not the only American corporation which finds the going tough in the face of German privacy laws. The country’s regulators put pressure on leading American companies such as Facebook and Apple for failing to meet their requirements in their online applications. Google has its own history of skirmishes with the Germans which dates back to controversies over the Street View cars that were deployed around the world to collect photos of buildings and streets, including people’s houses, to feed to a publicly available service. Google backed down to pressure to include an opt-out mechanism for the German public.

In relation to Google Analytics, the heart of the matter is the procedure of transferring the data, including individual IP addresses of people who wished to remain anonymous, to Google servers located in the United States and processing them there. Johannes Caspar has been involved in talks with Google since November 2009 and managed to push the company into making them more anonymous by cutting them short. It also made the company develop plug-ins for browsers which would allow users to disable the transfer of their browsing data (Google failed to do it for Safari and Opera). For a number of reasons, the talks collapsed at the beginning of 2011.

Now, German regulators speak openly of plans to impose administrative fines on those webmasters who condone Google’s practices by using its web measurement application. A trial against the American giant is also being considered. Google Deutschland retorts that it complies with all EU regulations.

Other providers of web analytics services are expected to jump to web owners’ rescue, using it as an opportunity to grab a larger share of the market. For example, Piwik, an open source, high-quality alternative to Google Analytics that sees user privacy and anonymity issues as a priority, is gaining increasing popularity.

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