Avoiding Personally Identifiable Information in Custom Variables in Google Analytics

Question

We are currently logging the type of user via custom variables. The types are to do with the level of service they have - gold, silver or bronze or just a regular non-logged in user.

Ideally what we would like to do is to log which users are logging in and using the system (and more importantly who isn't) however this would contravene the terms of Analytics as it would constitute personally identifiable information. (Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong here btw.)

However would it be allowed to track the organisation the user belonged to in Analytics? So each organisation has a number of logins and if we were to track that a visit belonged to a particular organisation?

Joe

(PS: I tried this on the product forums but had no luck so I am trying it again here.)

Answer 1

Joe rather than spend time trying to determine if what your sending to GA will violate their terms why not setup, open web analytics and track every little detail of your visitors on your own analytics system? Once you start linking visitors to any identifiable information I think it's going to violate Google's terms, if anything they would have the last say in what constitutes personal identifiable information, not anyone on this Q&A site.

Or use this service which gives you plenty if analytics on your members, who uses the system who hasn't logged in etc https://www.intercom.io

Answer 2

Use a unique user identifier from your own database such as a UUID or an integer primary key. Examples of what is permitted and what isn't are documented here.

With Universal Analytics, you can now either use the new User ID feature or set a custom dimension. This example does both:

 ga('create', 'UA-XXXXXX-Y', {'userId': customUserId});   // If "User ID" feature is available
 ga('set', 'dimension1', customUserId);                   // Set a `customUserId` dimension at page level
 ga('send', 'pageview');

You can of course still use custom variables if using the old Google Analytics tracking code

Once you've sent this data, you can then use the PII Viewer for Google Analytics Chrome extension to map the user ID stored in Google Analytics to locally stored personally identifiable information (PII) such as name, email address, company or zip code.

The information will be displayed in the Google Analytics interface like so: