CODEWITHSUNDEEP
google-analyticsgoogle-analytics-api
Jessa Manuel
Jessa Manuel

Reputation: 101

Disable GA Analytics Cookies and Deleting

Part of our GDPR Requirement is to disable the GA tracking, we already achieved this by setting the window property to "window['ga-disable-UA-XXXXX-Y'] = true;". But aside from this, we also wanted to delete the set cookies (i.e. " _ga", "_gid"). Will expiring the said cookie suffice for the deletion of those cookies, or is there a better way to approach this?

Or if this cookies won't be deleted, what are they for if the tracking is disabled.

Upvotes: 5

Views: 4207

Answers (1)

Eike Pierstorff
Eike Pierstorff

Reputation: 32770

These are first-party cookie set via Javascript, so expiring them will work just fine.

what are they for if the tracking is disabled.

I would venture that Google did not put a lot of thought into this - after all their cookie solution precedes the GDPR and any widespread notion of data protection. They just remain there because that is the default behaviour for cookies. The obvious downside is that if the opt-out is revoked (either on purpose or by accident) the client id from the cookie might be reused and the tracking data would be connected to existing data. So deleting the cookie is a really good idea. If you want to be particularly thorough, you could pick up the client id of a user who opts out and sent a request to the User Deletion API. This will not remove aggregated data, but will remove PII (namely client id and user id) to anonymize the data.

Upvotes: 2

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