New Google Analytics Privacy Features Announced by Google

google analytics 4 privacy features update

Google hosted a webinar on 23 March 2022 to talk about privacy features in Google Analytics.

They took the stance that Google Analytics can in fact be used within the EU. However, they also committed to create product features that will increase the ability to take privacy more seriously.

Furthermore, they reiterated their vision that a political solution like Privacy Shield (which was invalidated by Schrems II) must be recreated in order to move forward. You can read more about Google’s stance on these issues in our (continuously updated) page here.

Slide from Google Webinar about their stance on Privacy and Google Analytics

New Features: Controls for Data Collection in Google Analytics 4

IP Addresses will get new country-level privacy controls. A feature will be introduced that will allow us to collect Google Analytics data on EU-based servers and remove/obfuscate the IP address there, before forwarding the data to US-based servers. There was also a mention of future features that could help with cookies and metadata being obfuscated, but no details where given. We should see features roll out as early as April 2022.

The rest of the webinar was mostly about already existing privacy features available in Universal Analytics and Google Analytics 4.

If you want to learn how to configure Google Analytics 4 in “The Most Privacy Preserving Way”, please review our step-by-step guide on that here.

You can re-watch the webinar yourself by clicking here