With Analytics, everyone can see the behavior of visitors to their own website, but Google sees the behavior of all visitors across all thirty million websites where Google Analytics is installed. A real-time overview of visitor behavior every second, twenty-four seven, all year round.

Analytics: The Sellout to Silicon Valley. Self-built websites do not send user data to Silicon Valley. Until 2007, websites were generally free from surveillance. Today, almost all websites send their visitor data to Silicon Valley. How did this happen? Where does this difference come from? Silicon Valley—that is, Google—actually has no access to your visitor data. It can only read the website itself, just like any browser can. Just like you can, by right-clicking and selecting “View Source.” In the original HTML, anyone can view a website’s source code, but no one can access the visitor data. It’s not possible. No way. Google was originally a very well-functioning search engine. But apparently, that wasn’t enough for them. They wanted to read not only the website but also the visitor data. So the billion-dollar question was: How do we get our hands on the visitor data? Through special tools—specifically, free tools. Free tools that we had to get into the hands of web designers. Then, in 2007, the internet came to mobile phones. The vast internet on a tiny phone. That was too complicated for web designers to program. So they started using almost exclusively WordPress. They added text and images and uploaded the WordPress site to the internet. That was Google’s big breakthrough! They offered WordPress their free tools, which made creating and maintaining WordPress sites even easier. And bingo! Tens of millions of WordPress websites went live around the world—sites equipped with all the Google tools and now sending all visitor data to Google at any time. Among them is Google Analytics, which has been included in a wide variety of offerings. How does Google itself market Google Analytics?

“Gain key insights about customers.”

With it, you can literally track a visitor’s path through your website—where they go, how long they stay, where they leave, when they return, and how many times they ultimately visited. An experienced Analytics user can see all of this and more. And now comes the bombshell—something I don’t think anyone realizes: All those Custom Insights—the insights about all your visitors—are, of course, also available to Google! And not just those, but the data of all visitors to all analyzed websites. By 2024, twenty-nine million websites had installed Google Analytics. No matter which of them actually studies the details of their visitors every day, Google will analyze and store them without exception—and thus has a massive overview of internet traffic worldwide. Every day, twenty-four seven, all year round. For several years now, the privacy policies of websites infected with Analytics have included the standard text stating that the IP addresses of analyzed users are anonymized. Can visitors to such a website now sit back and relax? Of course not, because Analytics only works with JavaScript. For each visitor, JavaScript tracks fifty to seventy attributes. If the IP address is anonymized, all the other forty-nine to sixty-nine data points remain unchanged, and these are used to identify every visitor. Let me give an example. I have a specific background visible on my screen. Plus, I have a few browser extensions. That’s enough, of course, to uniquely identify me, because no one else on the internet has this combination.

How can you tell if Analytics is installed on a website? Right-click and select “View Source.” On a Mac, press the Control key, then select “View Source.” You’ll need a computer to do this; it’s more complicated on a cell phone.
Then type the first three letters of that beloved company’s name and click several times. If you come across a section that looks something like this—if the website contains this code—then Analytics is installed. You’ve been tracked, even if the privacy policy claims otherwise. How you navigate the website, when, and how often. Before 2007, HTML offered no way to collect visitor data. It wasn’t until web designers began using WordPress on a large scale—and WordPress integrated Google tools, including Google Analytics—that Google gained the unprecedented ability to monitor the entire internet: every movement of every user, every second. With Analytics, every website owner can see the behavior of their own visitors, but Google sees the behavior of all visitors across all thirty million websites where Google Analytics is installed. A real-time overview of visitor behavior every second, 24/7, all year round.

This was another post on the topic “If no one else says it, I’ll say it.” You can watch more videos anytime at blog.muinar.ch—free of surveillance and ad interruptions. You can also like, subscribe to, and comment on the video at blog.muinar.ch without feeding any algorithm. If you need a website that doesn’t send your visitor data to Silicon Valley, check out muinar.ch. If you found the video interesting, please share it. That’s it for today. Thanks for watching, and see you next time.