Comment by crazygringo
5 years ago
I'm confused.
I thought Google Analytics tracked you within a site, and that it's fundamentally not really any different from analyzing server logs except the logs are simply hosted in Google's cloud and visualized using Google's tools. I realize it uses cookies but that's to build analytics around sequences of user actions, since many users can be collapsed into a single IP. Privately hosted analytics software needs to use cookies to achieve the same thing as well.
Google Analytics doesn't have anything to do with building an advertising profile around users, correct?
I know it's popular to hate on Google but does this achieve anything against tracking users across sites in order to build advertising profiles? I was under the impression all the profile-building people object to was done via the pages with ads themselves.
Is Google Analytics actually an evil tool? Or is just "evil by association" because Google ads track users across sites, and Google Analytics also does "tracking" albeit a different kind? I'm just wondering if this is actually anything substantive, or if it's more symbolic.
Edit: wow those were some FAST downvotes. I'm just asking some basic questions to understand how meaningful this is, folks. Hopefully nobody's taking offense.
Google Analytics tracks you across different sites AFAIK. Mozilla supposedly has a special option in GA to not correlate data gathered on their sites with what GA gathers on others.
Even if it didn't, it still tells Google what you're visiting: with so many sites using it, they can get a pretty much complete view of your browsing history, just like Google Fonts.
> Google Analytics tracks you across different sites AFAIK.
See that's the thing, I keep seeing this asserted but when I search for any evidence, I can't find a single article that demonstrates this to be true.
If you own multiple sites you can enable analytics across them, but that's all.
And if Google wants to know what you're visiting to build advertising profiles, they have so many options -- not just Fonts, but DNS, Chrome, ads... it's not like GA by itself is making any substantive difference. But again, just because it could be used for this doesn't mean it is.
So I don't get how this is actually helping. I worry it's a distraction from actual achievements.
There is a an option, deep in your account settings to see what Google has collected on you.