[callahad]

Mozilla has an enterprise agreement with Google that limits what data is collected through GA and how it can be used. Quote:

    Our Google Analytics premium account is set to opt-out on all of 3rd party
    uses of the data and the only people who have access to the anonymous
    aggregated data is Mozilla Employees. This is not the normal Google
    Analytics setup that most people use on other websites.

    Also, to increase privacy we flipped the anonymize flag in the Google
    Analytics request [...] and don't do any cross-domain cookies within Google
    Analytics.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1122305#c8

[throwaway425]

If it's on Google's servers, then clearly Mozilla employees aren't the only ones with access to it, and the anonymization he's referring to is mere IP address anonymization, where the last octet of an IPv4 address is zeroed. The viability of browser fingerprinting as demonstrated by the EFF's Panopticlick shows cookies, cross-domain or otherwise, are no longer the only viable means to persistently tracking users.

[throwawayaway]

Google obviously have systems in place to allow employee access for absolute emergencies - but alarmed in case of unauthorised access.

in any case, the analytics data is anonymised and as such cannot be used to identify you. google goes to huge lengths anonymising data to aggregate you as a user into groups of millions for advertisers to bid on, you are simply not a big enough fish for special treatment.

edit: an explanation for downvoting is customary.

[dangrossman]

I didn't downvote you, but...

> google goes to huge lengths anonymising data to aggregate you as a user into groups of millions for advertisers to bid on, you are simply not a big enough fish for special treatment

You're mixing different products and people here. That may be true of Google Analytics data (I don't know either way), but it's not true for their advertising services. Google purposely tracks individual people in a non-anonymous way in order to sell remarketing products, to e.g. show a banner of items currently in your Amazon shopping cart alongside an article you're reading at CNN through their AdSense/DoubleClick platforms.

[throwawayaway]

is that not amazon sending cookies?

http://www.amazon.com/b?ie=UTF8&node=5160028011

i don't how that is google tracking you individually. can you please elaborate?