Safety and privacy on the web are essential for your website visitors.
Not only do your visitors want to keep their privacy when browsing the web, but it’s also against privacy laws and Google Analytics’ policies to collect personally identifiable information (PII) within the Analytics platform.
Sometimes, though, your website can do things like add a contact’s email address to a URL after they submit a form. That URL then gets captured in Google Analytics, and suddenly, you’ve got PII where it shouldn’t be.
That’s why MonsterInsights 8.24 includes Privacy Guard, our brand-new feature to help you keep PII out of Google Analytics and maintain your privacy law compliance.
What is Personally Identifiable Information?
Personally identifiable information, or PII, is anything that might provide the identity of a user. This might be an email address, the contents of their message, their name or username, or any other information that could personally identify them.
Depending on what WordPress plugins you’re using and how your website is set up, we’ve seen some PII get pulled into URLs in the query string (the information that’s after your regular URL). It often appears behind a question mark:
www.example.com/contact-us?email=xxx@xxx.com
Here’s what that would look like inside the Google Analytics Pages and screens report:
How to Keep PII Out of Google Analytics
To stay compliant with Google’s policies and privacy laws, you need to keep personally identifiable information out of Google Analytics. Thankfully, you can now do that with a couple of quick clicks in MonsterInsights.
First, make sure you’ve installed the latest version of MonsterInsights: 8.24.
Then, navigate to Insights » Settings and click on the Engagement tab. From there, find the Enable Privacy Guard switch and turn it on.
That’s it! With just a couple of clicks, MonsterInsights will now help you keep personally identifiable information out of your Google Analytics account and help keep you privacy law compliant.
Get started with MonsterInsights now.
For more on privacy law compliance, check out:
Google Analytics GDPR Compliance – Make Your Site Compliant
Guide to Google Analytics Cookies & Consent in GA4
How to Add a WordPress Cookie Consent Banner
Legal Disclaimer: Due to the dynamic nature of websites, no single plugin can offer 100% legal compliance. Please consult an Internet law attorney specialist to determine if you are in compliance with all applicable laws for your jurisdictions and your use cases. Nothing on this website should be considered legal advice.
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