A number of German legislators are reportedly engaged in efforts to ban Google Analytics from operating in the country.
According to a Zeit Online article quoted by TechCrunch, German officials are concerned that the application may be violating stringent national privacy laws. ??As such, the legislators have already “mulled” imposing fines on companies that use the tracking tool to collate detailed stats based on usage patterns.
“An approximate 13 percent of German website publishers (meaning those with sites that have .de as their TLD) currently use Google Analytics, including several websites of leading media organizations, political parties and pharmaceutical companies,” wrote Robin Wauters of TechCrunch Europe.
??”The government officials are particularly wary about the information Google is able to collect on websites of health insurance companies and the like, saying Google could conceivably create profiles of people that would include information about their interests, lifestyles, consumption patterns, political and sexual preferences.”
It should be noted that German officials previously criticized Google for allegedly keeping everyone “in the dark” about the offshore destination of locally harvested data.
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