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by TheLogothete 3700 days ago
This has gone full circle and honestly is quite irritating at this point.

People say that Google uses GA data for advertising, I say that this is not the case and then you just chose to ignore that. So I'm just gonna ask directly - can you show some evidence suggesting Google uses GA data for building advertising profiles or did you pull this opinion out of your ass?

Because as someone who analyses marketing and advertising data, I can tell you that I strongly believe they do not use GA data in this way. 1) They have no need to, they have better data; 2) This data is unreliable; 3) GA prohibits the use of personally identifiable information; and most important of all:

THE WEBMASTER CAN CHOSE TO NOT SHARE IT WITH THEM. If this webmaster went out of his way to tell google not to store IP information, I think it is pretty safe to assume that they did not opt-in to share the data with google AT ALL.

Apart from these technical reasons, using GA data in the way you think they do opens a regulatory risk of EPIC proportions.

But if you have some evidence to suggest that they do use it for "advertising profiles", please do share it. But if you can't and you formed this opinion because you are prejudiced, I would like to see you admitting it.

1 comments

THE WEBMASTER CAN CHOSE TO NOT SHARE IT WITH THEM

No they can't, unless that choice means that the data never arrives at Google's servers.

Of course they can. When you sign up for GA, you get asked

Do you want to share data with google to improve our products?

Do you want to pool aggregated data for benchmarking?

Both are unchecked by default.

Or do you think that google will access the data without permission? In which case, what do you base your opinion on?