Google Analytics 4 is a powerful tool for websites, allowing businesses to measure traffic performance metrics and in-depth insights, such as a user’s interests, search history, or past purchases. This data is immensely valuable to advertisers, but is collecting it legal under Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation? Is Google Analytics GDPR compliant?
How GDPR Impacts Web Analytics Tools Like GA4
To understand whether Google Analytics meets GDPR requirements, you first need to know what type of data collection the law covers. The rules of the GDPR apply to any organization that processes the personal data of people who live in the EU.
It doesn’t matter if your company has offices in Amsterdam or if you run an online consulting firm in the US. If EU residents regularly visit your website, you have to comply.
Under GDPR, personal data is any information that can directly or indirectly identify someone: names, identity documents, street addresses, phone numbers, and service contracts.
Are website traffic metrics considered personal data? GDPR Article 4 specifically calls out “location data” (including IP addresses) and “an online identifier” as personally identifiable information.
It also flags “profiling” activities, or processing user data to “analyze or predict aspects concerning that natural person’s performance at work, economic situation, health, personal preferences, interests, reliability, behaviour, location or movements.” These areas definitely connect Google Analytics and GDPR.
When Google Analytics Isn’t GDPR Compliant
Using Google Analytics as is, without privacy protections for EU users, is a GDPR disaster waiting to happen. GA4 relies on cookies to gather even basic insights on web traffic.
The GDPR doesn’t prohibit essential cookies for serving website content, such as making sure visitors can see the content or navigate to the correct page. But any type of analytics cookie falls un GDPR rules, even just assigning visitors an anonymous user ID to distinguish total traffic or sessions.
To avoid GDPR violations, you have to get user consent before gathering any non-essential cookie information:
- IP addresses
- Marketing identifiers
- Location data
- Google Signals data (demographics, interests, purchases, etc.)
- Search history
- Browser data
The problem? GA4 collects some of this information by default. To avoid violations, you have to tweak your site’s settings to only turn on GA4 cookies after the user accepts, and only for the purposes accepted.
How To Make Google Analytics GDPR Compliant
GDPR laws are constantly changing, and individual countries can have stricter rules. Here’s a good starting point for Google Analytics and GDPR compliance:
- Creating detailed privacy and cookie policies that explain exactly what data you gather, what cookies you use, how you use the data, where you store it, and for how long
- Enabling Google Consent Mode in GA4
- Giving users the option to consent or deny all or some non-essential cookies
- Keeping legal records of every consent document
- Deleting cookie data promptly when requested
Last but not least, you need to make a Data Processing Agreement with Google that outlines your use of GA4 in the EU.
Make Sure Your Google Analytics Tools Comply With GDPR
Managing GDPR rules can be a challenge, but with nearly 450 million people, the EU is a hard market to resist. Compyl can help you manage regulatory compliance for your entire software inventory. Request a demo to see how state-of-the-art GDPR solutions can streamline your operations.
