A heated debate has been raging through many parts of the analytics world lately. This time the topics are not related to data analysis and it is not web analysts and online marketers debating. The debate is about privacy on the web and it is the world of online marketing and web analytics against the views of politicians and data privacy advocates.

The debate is about the right to collect data about the visitors on a website or service using IP adresses and cookies. The debate started in Germany where there has been a ongoing debate whether or not it is allowed to use Google Analytics to track visits on a website. The issue is that Google Analytics stores the IP adress of the visit and IP adresses are considered private by German law. Website owners using Google Analytics were threatened with large fines if they did not remove Google Analytics from their sites.

Google and the German authorities manage to arrive at an agreement last week, so the Google Analytics users of Germany do not have to worry. What they should do however, is to add a IP masking to the GA code and placing a link to the Google opt-out site to avoid any possible issues in the future.

In the wake of the Google Analytics debate in Germany, a debate that made headlines in Norwegian newspapers, a simliar debate has arisen in Norway. This time it is not the collection of IP adresses that is the issue, but the use of cookies in tracking and marketing solutions. To meet new demands in the EU legislation Norwegian legislators have suggested to add a paragraph in the Norwegian law making use of cookies illegal unless the user has approved in advance. This has caused strong reactions in the digital marketing community as such a law would effectively put a stop to most solutions that analyze traffic and increase user experience by targeting content to the users interests. It also appears that the suggested addition to the law had not been sent on hearing to anyone working in the digital marketing community. It still remains to be seen if this law is approved.

To me the debates are not that interesting. There are easy ways around all these issues. What is interesting is why we are having these debates. The answer of course is the lack of knowledge of this field among politicians and privacy advocates. At the same time as they are fighting to aviod a cookie being embedded in their browsers they are sharing their lives on Twitter, Gowalla, Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, FourSquare and hundreds of other sites where actual private information is shared, stored and made available to companies and people all over the world forever.

If there was a more common understanding of what was made available of information about users through web anaytics tools and marketing platforms, I believe that the worries of privacy would disappear. The users should instead be made aware of the consequences of the sharing they are doing every day on the web. Try deleting personal information from Google.

The challenge for the online community is that the only way the politicians and privacy advocates will understand and realize that tracking and use of cookies is not dangerous is to educate them and give them understanding of the media that internet is. And we will have to seek them out and help them understand. They will not come to us.

Until then maybe all websites need to have the following message pop up when you arrive to the site:

Dear visitor – you are being tracked. We are not doing this because we want to spy on you but because we want to make our website better suited for your needs and to give you the best possible experience of it. Our goal is that you are happy when you leave our website and that you easily managed to do the task you came to it to solve. If we remove our tracking it is impossible for us to provide you this service. Do not worry about your privacy, we do not know anything personal about you, to us you are just a number. And if you do not want the rest of the world to know everything about your life, stop sharing it on Twitter. Have a nice visit!