The European Union and Google have been at the heart of many conflicts in recent years. The EU wants to regulate Google’s activities in the continent and crack down on its monopoly. In one of the recent cases, Italy is telling its webmasters to ditch Google Analytics and switch to other services. Google Analytics allows webmasters to track and analyze their website’s traffic, and it’s the world’s most popular service for this purpose. Italy says the way Google Analytics processes the data violates GDPR. The government claims Analytics collects and transmits users’ data, including IP addresses, to hometown United States. Since the data of European users is transmitted to the US, this data can be seen by the government or other third parties involved. This could be an example of violating GDPR. Italy’s competition authority announced a 90-day time frame for domestic web services provider Caffeina Media to ditch its relationship with Google Analytics.
EU raises concerns about Google Analytics data processing methods
Of course, Italy is not the first European country to blame Google and ask its webmaster to switch from it. Previously, Austria and France raised similar concerns about Analytics. Dates back to February, France’s national commission on the freedom of liberation (CNIL) warned about the Google Analytics data practices, saying using the tool could breach the EU laws. Austria’s Data Protection Authority also announced a similar decision in January. Google’s efforts to challenge and revise these rulings have also been unsuccessful. Google could not show EU officials that European user data was anonymized before it was transferred to servers in the United States. Also, Google itself holds the encryption keys. To gain the public’s trust, Google decided to shut down its Universal Analytics platform. Also, the company tried to develop new web trackers. In Google Analytics 4, Google even tried to limit tracking activities. But its methods still heavily rely on collecting data from users, and it’s unlikely to gain EU officials’ trust. Even in the United States, many concerns exist about Google’s data practices. The US senators recently asked the FTC to investigate Google and Apple’s activities in collecting users’ data.
