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Google Analytics privacy issue

I have a question about privacy issues with Google Analytics.

I heard that Google Analytics keeps the collected IP addresses indefinitely. It's true? Is an IP address the only thing that lasts forever?

If true, is there a way to prevent this (from our side, not from users)?

Can you talk about why and your sources.

I have some issues that convince some privacy people to use Analytics. Do you have good arguments why using Google Analytics and Google that saves all your data is not a privacy issue?

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So, @dan_waterworth is somewhat correct, except that there is no evidence that I know that Google is actively linking Google Analytics data and login data. And, to be honest, I would be surprised if they did, because if they were caught, it would threaten their main profit center: Adwords.

When you make a request to any server, anywhere, this server has the ability to permanently store your IP address. The same can be said for Google Analytics. They store but never disclose your IP address in order to track the geographical location in order to publish city / country / continent level information in their reports. They constantly store any information they collect, as this is the whole purpose of the analytics site. Thus, they save your IP address, regardless of whether the flash is turned on, whether you have Java turned on, your browser version, operating system version, screen resolution and all that they can extract from the browser environment. They cannot and cannot associate your visits to one site ( foo.com ) with visits to another ( bar.com ), because they use third-party cookies. In addition, tracking them on an individual level is not really dependent on long-term tracking, as cookies expire and are deleted.

However, the German government (mostly) outlawed this tracking level due to privacy issues. In response, Google introduced a function called anonymizeIP , called as _ gat._anonymizeIp (); or _gaq.push(function() { _gat.anonymizeIP(); }); in asynchronous code that instructs Google’s servers to hide the final octet from the IP address before storing the record permanently. The disadvantage is the slight inaccuracy of the geographic data in your reports.

Google also offers a persistent browser-based Google Analytics opt-out , which allows any end-user to disconnect Google Analytics from their tracking.Thus, an extremely confidential end-user can simply add this plugin and not worry about tracking it by Google.

However, any website can store the same information. Anyone who cares so much about privacy should just stay away from the Internet, as there is no way to ensure that other sites or mechanisms do not track you.

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Google Analytics is a request to google servers. If you are logged into your google account and logged in using Google Analytics, then Google can register who you are and what pages you visit. The same with facebook as buttons, but for facebook.

this is not a security issue, but privacy. The only way to prevent this is to not use Google Analytics.

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