Google Analytics May Be Illegal In Germany 241
sopssa sends in a TechCrunch story that begins "Several federal and regional government officials in Germany are trying to put a ban on Google Analytics, the search giant's free software product that allows website owners and publishers to get detailed statistics about the number, whereabouts, and search behavior of their visitors (and much more)." Here's Google's translation of the article from Zeit Online (original in German). A German lawyer cited there says that penalties for websites that uses Google Analytics could amount to €50,000 (about $75,000). Reader sopssa adds, "The amount of data Google collects from everywhere on the Internet is indeed huge, and website owners should be using a local open source alternative to keep visitor data private."
Schadenfreude (Score:5, Funny)
Everything is illegal in Germany.
Re:Schadenfreude (Score:5, Funny)
Everything is illegal in Germany.
Bullshit. Only if its usefull for anything.
Otherwise the chances of it being illegal are merely high.
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Sssh. You're not supposed to mention 'H'. And whatever you do, don't talk about the war.
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What war?
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"you know who"
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Re:Schadenfreude (Score:5, Insightful)
Except saying bad words on TV or being naked in public :)
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and drinking alcohol in public (including parks and public transport)
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While I agree that things are overregulated, how is this any different from the police patroling the Golden Gate bridge with autmatic weapons? An M4 as far as I remember - I was there.
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Frankfurt airport really sucks. Try DUS sometimes, it is much more relaxed and friendly.
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I think you're just an idiot. If you find any police presence in Germany (Europe) more threatening than *anything* in the US, you're out of your mind.
The German police certainly sound more threatening. A friend of mine spent the summer there, and saw lots of police with automatic weapons, grenades, bandoleers, the whole nine yards. Stateside, that level of armament means either a SWAT team or the regular military.
German police: definitely more "threatening." Not necessarily any more dangerous, but defi
Re:Schadenfreude (Score:4, Informative)
I call bullshit.
The German policemen have a handgun, that's it.
As far as I know they don't have a shotgun in the trunk or anything.
Policemen with more armament are the German equivalent of SWAT or riot troops (say when a major league soccer game is on or a high profile demonstration).
Re:Schadenfreude (Score:5, Informative)
I wonder how your friend managed to see such heavy armed police that often. I actually live in germany and the normal police officer has his normal gun and nothing else. I only see police with automatic weapons at the airport. I have never seen police with grenades and neither with bandoleers. I think your friend is full of shit.
Says the guy who does not even have firsthand experience of seeing german police? When talking about mere perceived threat, juding by what i occasionally see on tv news, i would feel much more threatened by the police and other security in the USA, carrying nasty stuff like teasers and so. I've never seen a machine gun outside of a german airport, and the only other weapon beside the normal police gun i have seen with german police was a club. And this is very unusual as well.
So stop spreading second hand bullshit.
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Hey, don't tease me bro!
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Legally police in the US need to be carrying a non-lethal weapon if they're armed, so they have options before handling their pistol.
Maybe, but what has that got to do with tasers [healthdiaries.com]?
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You friend is probably a liar. I've never seen a German policeman with anything larger than a pistol and I live in Germany since 1993.
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I never saw german police with grenades.
And I rarely saw them armed with more than a handgun before The Great Fear Of Terror swept over us.
OTOH, speaking of regular military... thats one thing you won't see at all: Armed military troops. They aren't allowed to do any domestic operations. So, if big guns are needed, yes, they will be handled by a special team of the police.
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Hmm. I've lived in Germany since 2007, and I've yet to see a German police officer with anything more than a handgun. At the bigger airports, there'll be a couple of guys with assault rifles somewhere, but that's it.
German police are only threatening if you think they're Nazis, which the vast majority of them aren't. Heck, I've always been treated well by the German police, including being driven home for free on New Year's Day after drinking a bit too much. After spending time in both the US, Germany,
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I always hear about them banning something or other for some stupid reason because it isn't good for the public.
The most recent thing I heard about was that German politicians banned paintball because they believe it will lead to less gun-related violence and therefore good for society, and then you can't say anything about Nazis or face jail time or some other severe penalty and video games have to be heavily censored.
I could go on o
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I'm german and i actually feel that i'm in a very free country, thank you very much. Yes, there are some laws which i disagree with, but overall it is fine.
Re:Schadenfreude (Score:5, Insightful)
Sorry, disregard my other posting, something went wrong.
I'm german and i actually feel that i'm in a very free country, thank you very much. Yes, there are some laws which i disagree with, but overall it is fine.
Complete bullshit. You can say a lot about nazis and the nazi era. You can discuss this, and you are even free to utter dumb sentences like "not everything was bad in nazi germany" (which is technically spoken true, but a dumb statement nethertheless as a german tv personality badly learned a while a ago).
You are only banned from showing symbols like the swastika, play/sing some songs like the "Horst Wessel Lied" (horst wessel song, hymn of the nazi party), deny the holocaust or praise the unlawful nazi regime. But even doing this will most of the time not lead you into jail. A fine will do in most cases.
Now you might argue that this is against freedom of speech, but as a german i feel that given our history there is very good reason to ban said things, especially denying the holocaust. Our ancestors have done enough harm to e.g. jews, there is no need to further harm them by allowing to state that the horror they (the few who were not killed) encountered actually never happened.
Yes, you could go on with bullshit claims, but this still puts germany nowhere near china. Not quite as bad? That is the understatement of the year.
Still the fact is that free speech is actually provided in germany. But most of us germans (and europeans in general) have a different feeling of the meaning of free speech. Free speech is fine, but the right to it ends where others are harmed. I don't have a problem with that, and most people i know don't have either. This concept might be hard to grasp for a citizen of the United States, but i'm still fine with it and i don't feel that i'm missing some of the banned speech.
I take it that you are from the US. People like you also have a long way to go until you will finally understand that the us american believes are not the holy grail to which the whole world needs to subscribe.
Re:Schadenfreude (Score:4, Insightful)
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So you have free speech by you can't freely say the the holocaust didn't happen, In most free countries free speech is the right to say anything no matter how ignorant with out penalty under the law. There are two exemptions yelling fire in a theater and calling for violence, everything else is protected.
That's not true. There are a multitude of exceptions even under US law, which has the strongest free speech protections in the world. The general rule is that to restrict speech, the government must show that the measure is narrowly tailored to serve a compelling interest. Some types of speech that are illegal in the US, randomly off the top of my head: defamation; false advertising; inciting crime; cigarette advertising in many contexts; obscenity; lying in court or to police or a grand jury; breaking a
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You're not as far off the deutchmark as you think.
There, fixed that for you.
Re:Schadenfreude (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Schadenfreude (Score:4, Insightful)
Ridiculous. (Score:5, Insightful)
If you come to my website then I, or my designated party, have the right to record the fact that you came to my website. If you don't like it then don't use the web. Is it also against the law to record what customers come in the door of your brick and mortar store in Germany?
Re:Ridiculous. (Score:5, Informative)
There are however data protection laws in place and especially about storing personal information in other countries. From the article:
This isn’t the first time German privacy protection officials have voiced their concerns about the Google Analytics service, as it had earlier criticized the search giant over keeping everyone ‘in the dark’ about which information they’re collecting exactly and how much identifiable data is sent to and stored on servers located on U.S. soil. German laws prohibit such data to leave the country, they claim.
If you or your website is giving such personal info to other party and it's stored elsewhere, you will be just as liable. And let's be honest, Google is able to profile people really good. German authorities are especially worried about political parties and pharmaceutical companies websites.
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Re:Ridiculous. (Score:5, Interesting)
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Analytics isn't really an advertising tool. It just keeps statistics on things obvious to the web server when you connect to it. IP address, location, referring page, browser, etc. It's like knowing that a middle-aged white male in a red sweatshirt came in the door.
Not local (Score:5, Informative)
It just keeps statistics on things obvious to the web server when you connect to it. IP address, location, referring page, browser, etc.
But these statistics aren't run local on the webserver itself. They are transmitted to Google.
It's like knowing that a middle-aged white male in a red sweatshirt came in the door.
No.
It's like *telling Big Brother* that a middle-aged white male in a red sweatshirt came in the door of your house.
And asking Big Brother to do some statistics about who comes to your house for you.
Sure from the website's owner point of view, the result is the same : he/she got on who visits the site.
BUT from the *user* point of view it is different : The user accepted the fact that, by entering your house, you'll know the users' age/sex/clothes colour. BUT the user never accepted in the first place that you also send these informations to big brother.
The EU regulate clearly what you can transmit to 3rd party.
Here the problem is not that website are doing *stastistics* (they can the information is trivial).
The problem is that, in order to compute said stats, the websites *forwards* the data to google : a 3rd party which has nothing to do in the first palce.
The solution : Use adblock and/or noscript.
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A. An American site doing this with euro user data?
B. A site keeping it's logs on its own and then, at a later date, transmitting them to Google?
Who owns the logs?
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So then, how can the EU legislate:
A. An American site doing this with euro user data?
They can't.
But they can legislate EU sites trying to circumvent EU data protection laws by forwarding tha data to countries with lower data protection standards.
You see, no legislation of US sites.
B. A site keeping it's logs on its own and then, at a later date, transmitting them to Google?
Who owns the logs?
It's not about who owns the logs, but who owns the data inside them?
Personal data in the logs is still owened by the person that is identified by the data. Like.. if a take a photo of your face, i might own the picture, but I won't own your face.
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This will, of course, lead to an uptick in US-based webhosting for German businesses. Great news, really. Unless Germany wants to create its own Great Firewall.
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If it's a German business, it's bound by German law. Having the webhosting in the U.S. won't help in that case.
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So no EU country outsources their customer service to India or elsewhere?
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Given that Indians rarely speak French, German, Swedish, Spanish, Finnish, and so on, the answer is that no, usually they don't.
Minimize visible costs, and be damned (Score:2)
Given that Indians rarely speak French, German, Swedish, Spanish, Finnish, and so on, the answer is that no, usually they don't.
Indians don't usually speak Finnish, and Finns don't usually speak Hindi or Bengali or Gujarati etc. But that does not stop companies in Finland outsourcing tech support to India. That's the case where I work, for instance. The language used for support is English, sort-of, on both sides. The result is that there are not too many requests for tech support, reducing visible tech support costs quite dramatically. Invisible costs are another matter.
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Re:Not local (Score:4, Insightful)
It's like *telling Big Brother* that a middle-aged white male in a red sweatshirt came in the door of your house.
No, it's like telling a guy at a marketing company that a middle-aged white male in a red sweatshirt came in the door of your business.
A marketing company that is paying you or has some type of agreement with you to supply such information.
No. Google tracking cookies are unique to a single browser profile. Thats usually even a single user account.
So it's like letting "big brother" now, that the SAME person that used his credit card, issued to "Henry Johnson, Whatever Rd 34 (full adress)" at Walmart 2 hours ago, and who watched "Nuns with leather & whips" porn site 2 days ago, just came in the door of your house. Oh and yes, he's wearing a red sweatshirt.
Re:Ridiculous. (Score:4, Informative)
It's not really about you recording the fact that someone came to your website. The article says that there are worries that Google could further use the data, and eg connect it with the data they might have from Google Mail or other sites using Google Analytics, thus generating profiles about habits and preferences etc. If you use Google Mail, it is your own decision, but you might not be aware if you visit a site using Google Analytics and that not only the site owner records the fact that you were there, but Google knows, too (including all other Google Analytics sites you were visiting).
According to the article, nothing is decided. There is also some dispute whether the above scenario is possible under Google's own usage terms. Currently, it's a discussion among the data protection officials from the various German states. So, currently, they are basically doing their job.
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It's not really about you recording the fact that someone came to your website. The article says that there are worries that Google could further use the data, and eg connect it with the data they might have from Google Mail or other sites using Google Analytics, thus generating profiles about habits and preferences etc.
So collecting data is ok, but it's forbidden to run certain algorithms on the collected data? Something tells me this isn't a particularly sustainable arrangement.
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So collecting data is ok, but it's forbidden to run certain algorithms on the collected data?
No. It's forbidden to send the data to a 3rd party like Google without the website vistor's consent. Which is what a website operator using Google Analytics apparently does.
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Except that for me the GA servers are exceedingly slow (unlike about everything else Google hosts) so GA added ten to thirty seconds of loading time to every page using it until I stopped at at the DNS level.
Reduced GA usage can only improve the web.
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You don't have that right if the laws don't give it to you. Don't like the laws, move elsewhere.
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Businesses will.
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The problem is that they really don't move. They merely claim they are based in the Cayman Islands to get out of taxes while staying right where they are. If they actually picked up and moved to the Cayman Islands, then I would have no problem with it.
The current "have your cake and eat it, too" situation is bullshit.
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Complete nonsense. (Score:4, Insightful)
Dear Sir or Madam,
this is acutally complete nonsense.
If you choose to publish, you have no right whatsoever to track who is reading your publication for what reason.
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If you don't like that data collected, then don't present it. Its that simple.
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The German privacy protection officials are just noting that GA means gathering personal data in the EU and sending it to a country with lesser data protection standards, which EU privacy law forbids. Enumerating which bits of personal data can be used to identify a person is not a good idea as technology changes faster then legislation does so the only sensible thing is to protect all of it.
I'd
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What about cookies?
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So turn off cookies. I don't need them to track you.
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If you run that website in Germany, it is illegal for you to save customers' personal data longer than X days.
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If you run that website in Germany, it is illegal for you to save customers' personal data longer than X days.
Germany is using Roman numerals again?
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OK, s/X/$X/.
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It's not personal information. It's anonymous stats.
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A "usage profile" for a user ID is also considered illegal if the user hasn't opted in or it is at least clear that the data is being collected. This is because those stats are not really anonymous. If they were, Google wouldn't be interested in them. It has been shown repeatedly that tracking back "anonymous" profiles to a RL user isn't hard if you have enough data.
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Also, does this apply to cookies? The data isnt actually stored on your server, but on the client machines...
Re:Ridiculous. (Score:5, Informative)
Is it also against the law to record what customers come in the door of your brick and mortar store in Germany?
Depends. It is illegal to store their name, home address, passport number and blood type just because they wanted to shop at your place, yes.
And rightly so. You do business under the law of the land, so the law of the land tells you how you can do it. If you don't like it, you can shove off to some place in the middle of Africa where they don't have laws.
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And rightly so. You do business under the law of the land, so the law of the land tells you how you can do it. If you don't like it, you can shove off to some place in the middle of Africa where they don't have laws.
Maybe the law of the land is bullshit? Maybe there is another alternative to "accepting all existing and planned laws" than living in Africa?
Re:Ridiculous. (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not quite as cut-and-dry as you think.
It could very well be illegal to follow you around the store and record every product you looked at, and then follow you around the library and see every book you look at (and then examine the records to see what you have ever checked out), then followed you to the video store and measured exactly how much time you spent looking at each title (and also examine your rental history).
The Germans lived through both the Nazis and with the KGB. They have a good reason to be sensitive about protecting people's privacy.
Blocked with NoScript (Score:2, Informative)
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Re:Blocked with NoScript (Score:5, Informative)
Install the RequestPolicy add-on and browse
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Fortunately, they don't sneak around a HOSTS file very easily. (I suppose they could replace themselves with their own IP addresses, but that defeats the purpose of DNS, and would render them visually indistinguishable from malware. Which, in a sense, they are...)
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Fortunately, they don't sneak around a HOSTS file very easily.
Buy a new domain and IP address and obfuscate yourself. Boom, pwned the HOSTS file.
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Open source? (Score:4, Funny)
"Do, we didn't illegally disclose your data; we open-sourced it!"
What's one of the #1 blocked items in my browser? (Score:2)
Google Analytics
Just behind doubleclick.net
It never makes a noticeable difference to have both disabled so far.
Another reason to avoid Internet Explorer until it gets a no script equivalent (which it never will).
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Well, it makes. For the website author who just wants to have the goddamned statistics presented in a convinient, easy-to-digest format to be able to focus on actual improvements to the website, and not on wrestling with half-arsed local statistics generators that use access logs, 1px images, session cookies and somesuch.
As a website admin, I'd gladly switch to a solution that does not raise such concerns as GA, but there is none of comparable quality and I'm not in position to make my own with an appropria
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Re:What's one of the #1 blocked items in my browse (Score:2)
Another reason to avoid Internet Explorer until it gets a no script equivalent (which it never will)
Way back in the IE4 days, I used a mixture of the zone system (Trusted Sites for those few where I wanted Javascript) and the hosts file. These days, if you use multiple browsers then privoxy [privoxy.org] is the better solution because the one configuration will work in all the browsers (yes, including Internet Explorer).
Re:What's one of the #1 blocked items in my browse (Score:2)
Another reason to avoid Internet Explorer until it gets a no script equivalent (which it never will).
http://www.ie7pro.com/ [ie7pro.com]
Has Google ever betrayed our trust? (Score:2, Interesting)
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I don't understand people saying that Google knows too much about each of us. [...] has Google ever done wrong by their users? And besides [...] I don't really care if Google knows my surfing habits. I hear the same argument against the club cards at supermarkets, and the same response applies.
Thank you for not caring. This is not about google but the
Over here in the real world, there is quite a difference between an opt-in scheme and the default assumption that your visitors don't mind you keeping every bit of information you can. "Well, then they shouldn't visit me!" you say, ignoring the huge power differential between the average visitor (consumer) and website owner (vendor).
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but has Google ever done wrong by their users?
And would you ever know? Are you sure that the prices you find on line are the same ones I see? Some manufacturers of luxury goods might not even want "your kind" seen in public with their product (replace "your kind" with whatever socio-economic group you want). Maybe you can't even see their web pages in a search.
I don't really care if Google knows my surfing habits. I hear the same argument against the club cards at supermarkets, and the same response applies.
In addition to the loyalty club discount, I also get an additional percentage knocked off at the cash register. Plus, I get rebates. Because they like me. I'm a desirable customer. You, not so mu
Oh, that will improve things (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, I certainly want my personal data tracked and stored by 200 small-to-medium businesses that don't understand net security rather than one company with the knowledge and resources to do it well. I feel safer already!
Hell froze over. (Score:3, Funny)
Government wants to ban a proprietary tool serving obtaining vast amounts of data about the net users by a big corporation, without the users' content. The government suggests an open-source alternative.
Slashdot crowd violently opposes.
brb checking if RMS applied for a job at Microsoft.
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Said big corporation is Google. Google can't do wrong, you know?
Drupal has a Piwik module (Score:2)
Just checked and Drupal has a reasonably good Piwik module. Good news for me! I'll be switching a site I admin (120k users) to it in the next week. I already disallow google analytics because I've never enabled it via NoScript, but my visitors don't. When I got started, there wasn't really a good alternative to GA for what we were doing short of rolling our own.
So block it (Score:2)
Take a look at your cookies (Score:4, Informative)
google should comply (Score:2)
Strange, but in this case I think that the german law is in the right and google should change (and many other sites, such as adsense should too)
Web sites today collect much too much data on users. This data could easily fall into the wrong hands, and you have no control over who collects what, and who stores what. And, for every trick you find for web sites not to track you, new tricks are invented to continue to do so. Once it was enough to turn off cookies. Today you also need noscript, and betterPrivacy
Google translation (Score:3, Insightful)
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The Euro was introduced in 2002. 10 years ago that would have been in Deutschmark.
The Euro was introduced January 1st, 1999. In 2002, the Euro cash was introduced, up til then, the old national coins and bills were used as "regional" denominations of the Euro. But they were no independent currencies anymore.
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The Euro was introduced in 2002
Wish I could get mod points for posting blatently incorrect information.
Re:Oh noes! They stored a cookie! (Score:4, Informative)
And they are storing that cookie everywhere on the internet now a days. Google can build a pretty accurate profile about you (unless you've blocked it, but 'casual' people usually don't)
Have you actually used the Analytics service? It shows very detailed information about visitors, where they are coming from and what they do on the website. There's tons of statistics and other stuff available, and Google can track the individual people across the internet.
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Google Analytics records how many times you have been to the site, for report purposes. Now multiply by the number of websites that have Analytics "installed" and it's pretty clear that Google can make a good profile of almost all your web accesses.
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Adblock Plus doesn't block anything by default. It does present you with a list of filter subscriptions. Just install EasyPrivacy [adblockplus.org] from the same folks who probably made the subscription you use now (EasyList).
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