Google once used the slogan “don’t be evil” to distinguish itself from its competitors, but now a growing number of pro-privacy startups are rallying to the mantra “don’t be Google”.
February 15,2022 Google once used the slogan “don’t be evil” to distinguish itself from its competitors, but now a growing number of pro-privacy startups are rallying to the mantra “don’t be Google”. They are taking on Google Analytics, a product used by more than half of the world’s websites to understand people’s browsing habits. “Google made a lot of good tools for a lot of people,” says Marko Saric, a Dane living in Belgium who set up Plausible Analytics in Estonia in 2019. “But over the years they changed their approach without really thinking what is right, what is wrong, what is evil, what is not.” Saric and many others are benefitting from GDPR, a European privacy regulation introduced in 2018 to control who can access personal data. Last week, France followed Austria in declaring Google’s practice of transferring personal data from the EU to its US servers was illegal under GDPR because the country does not have adequate protections. Google disagrees, saying the data is anonymised and the scenarios envisaged in Europe are hypothetical. Nevertheless, startups see an opening in a true David vs Goliath battle. “The week that Google Analytics was ruled illegal by the Austrian DPA (data protection authority) was a good week for us,” says Paul Jarvis, who runs Fathom Analytics from his home in Vancouver Island, Canada. He says new subscriptions tripled over that week, though he does not give exact numbers. Google dominates the analytics market with 57 percent of all websites using its service, according to survey group W3Techs.
