…in Austria.
Yes, this is no joke and the courts of Austria have ruled that the practice of Google Analytics to feed data to the Google Ads service and to the USA is in violation of the legislation that is the GDPR.
But don’t worry, not too many businesses use Google Analytics. Or..?
The benefit of global data giants is that the data truly becomes BIG DATA, but the problem is that the data is BIG. This means that it can and often is passed between jurisdictions and nation borders and might end up somewhere the citizens don’t want it to end up (read: the NSA, CIA, FSB, etc.).
In this light alternative ways of analyzing your website traffic becomes more relevant. There are a multitude of different analytical services out there but the fact is that many piggyback on GA. So how are those services affected by this ruling (or future rulings)? This is of course very hard to say, be sure that Google have thrown their very best at the issue.
Our approach have always been to set the integrity of the individual in the centre. We are not piggybacking on Google Analytics, we built our own software to collect and analyze data with multiple layers of integrity protection such as anonymous identifiers, pseudonymization, clearing logs of cached data on a regular basis and always with the legal ground to do so. And as we only use 1st party identifiers for our analytical service, so the data will not be matched to other systems or platforms.
And the data never leaves the EU.
I think that this type of services that are based on local or regional legislations will become even more relevant as the knowledge of the rights you have a s a user increases.
Read more about the case in Austria here: https://switch.com.mt/google-analytics-court-ruling-austria/
