Lax laws and sweetheart deals are becoming a thing of the past for big tech firms, particularly in Europe where a series of rulings is posing a major threat to one of Google’s flagship products.
March 25,2022 Lax laws and sweetheart deals are becoming a thing of the past for big tech firms, particularly in Europe where a series of rulings is posing a major threat to one of Google’s flagship products. More than half of the world’s websites use Google Analytics to help their owners understand the behaviour of users. The software, which deploys cookies to track user behaviour, costs nothing in cash terms—though the vast trove of data helps to fuel Google’s massive profits. But activists have filed dozens of cases with regulators in Europe arguing that the tool breaches privacy laws by transferring data to the United States. Regulators in several countries agree with activists and have ruled Google Analytics incompatible with European data privacy regulation (GDPR). The rulings leave many European firms in a bind. They can ditch Google and move to a privacy compliant option that costs money, or wait it out and hope for a solution from Google, the regulators or the politicians. Potential fixes Last week, Google said it would release a new version of its software that would not store IP addresses, the unique code that can identify individual computers.
