Blogboing

Every geek knows that google search tracks user behavior. When you use google search engine your queries, queries time and clicked results are recorded by google in order to improve their service and if you are into conspiracy theories, to profile people. Since 70% of the people use google it’s not a small matter – google has a lot of data on how/what we search for and what sites answer our query. Usually people who hear this story react in two ways: the easy going say “who cares.. I have nothing to hide” the more privacy cautious start deleting their cookies.

This is an old story, but it has a new twist to it which I have noticed only recently. When I was visiting my favorite torrent site I noticed that they are using Google Analytics as their site analysis service. I found it very strange. Not only does google track my online habits on their search engine, they can now track me on none google sites as well. It all started 2 years ago when google opened up Google Analytics, till then a paid service, for free use by the public. Till then it cost about $5k a year for websites to have similar web analytics and this was a real treat to a lot of websites. Slowly, one after the other, more and more websites started using google analytics, which is a hosted software on Google’s servers, as their web analytics software. In essence, Google got a full knowledge of where we go, what we do there, where we go from there, what we search for and what we do after we find it – no matter where we are on the web.

I knew a lot of sites use google analytics, after all it’s a great service, but I didn’t expect a torrent site to run it due to its “controversial” content. I wondered how many big sites run analytics or are tracked by google. So I ran a little test on the most popular sites according to alexa:

41 of the 100 most popular sites are tracked by Google, and anything you say, post, read or do there is recorded by Google. If you remove google search sites you learn that 14 out of 74 top websites use Google Analytics. These do not include sites that use adwords or google search in their websites which also adds information to google’s tracking and profiling. That is a lot. You would expect site owners to hide their site stats from google. I was especially surprised by friendster, adult friend finder and Fotolog usage of Google Analytics… you would expect them to guard their stats data and host some other web analytics application. People who like to visit mininova or Youporn probably get an un easy feeling as well. As you can see Google knows a lot about your online habits. You can argue that they don’t use the data or that not much can be done with all this data but without a doubt Google holds too much information on all of us. Especially as a corporate that does not like to disclose what they do with all that tracked data.

For the more privacy cautious between us the solution for preventing any site’s Google Analytics to record any information on us is quite simple. Just add to your hosts file the following lines:
127.0.0.1 www.google-analytics.com
127.0.0.1 google-analytics.com
127.0.0.1 ssl.google-analytics.com
127.0.0.1 *.google-analytics.com

Google Analytics javascript won’t be downloaded to your computer nor will it be able to send data home.

You better
Watch out
you better not cry,
you better not pout I’m tellin’ you why,
Google is coming to town,
they are making a list checking it twice,
gonna find out who’s naughty or nice,
Google is coming to town.

I don’t know why but the original song has a less scary feel to it.