Privacy By Design Saves You Money: Google Analytics has an opt out browser add on

This week I was emailed by a very large wordpress community out there saying either I had to anonymize IP addresses deep inside google analytics or use an annoying pop up for it on my site but they were coming to the rescue with a premium plugin to save the day, at a price...

However I knew from having actually read the official information that it should never be necessary for me to buy something like that, I had been saying here all along it's up to google to do something at its back end, well I just discovered that it has - I don't know how long this is out there but I just discovered it having a bit of fun browsing the privacy policies of national sites with deep pockets and teams of lawyers in them and our national weather site here had a link to a Google Analytics opt out browser add-on for visitors who do not want to be tracked!! I'd be so pissed off right now if I'd shelled out for a premium plugin to do this.

But is it necessary to present people with this option?

I'm still not convinced.

...in some ways we are turning visitors into restaurant critics or divas demanding a bunch of stuff they don't need that could actually 'break the internet' and may have been covered under 'collecting data you need' within the regulations.

Why I'm Showing You This

I'm just showing you this in case you feel pushed into a corner to do something about GA at some point and so that you remember 'privacy by design' is part of GDPR, it's not all on us and we should not have to pay for plugins. But time will tell if we really need to use that.

Has Europe Gone Overboard?

That said, the european sites I've been on this week seem to have gone absolutely overboard with GDPR, I'm convinced some have been given expensive bad advice, and others are just going to copy what everyone else is doing. Though thankfully they are doing different things, and there are different interpretations visible as the dust settles on this and some saner than others.

And it's not just websites - I know of some businesses that have jumped on the GDPR bandwagon with privacy by design working against their customers - either with wrong advice or deliberately trying to get $1000 out of their customers for 'updated GDPR compliant software' . The example I saw was certainly wrong but most people will fall for it unless they read up the official website data.

Watching the dust settle on this,

Mary