Google have today officially announced they are making efforts to further improve security their Google Analytics product and the data transmitted to and from it.
Google Analytics is one of the most popular web analytics tools available today, used by hundreds of thousands of sites world-wide to gather statistical information about a website’s visitors; a service which has been available to the public for over 10 years since November 2005.
Improving Security: SSL for all requests
The service, offered by Alphabet Inc. subsidary Google, is a continually developed product, offering new features and improving on existing services throughout it’s lifetime. The most recent improvements made to the service positively affect customer’s security, forcing secure, encrypted connections from user’s websites to the service for loading scripts and transmitting data. Google claim that the changes are influenced by recent increases in privacy concernes from web users as a whole:
With the increase in privacy related concerns we have made the decision to secure all communication to and from Google Analytics, protecting our clients, our client’s end users, and the broader internet.
Google have also posted a related Google Analytics Help Article, which further explains the improvements and the effects it may have on users.
Security and privacy are of utmost importance to our clients, our clients’ end users, and to Google, and secure transmission of our JavaScript libraries and measurement data is essential to that end. To implement secure transmission, Google Analytics uses HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS), which instructs browsers that support HTTP over SSL (HTTPS) to use that encryption protocol for all communication between end users, websites, and our servers.
A More Secure Web
Google’s latest developments are a strong step forward from a large web service provider towards a more secure web, following recent security announcements from many other web and mobile-based organisations such as the recent announcement from WhatsApp offering End-to-End chat encryption.
Gambit Nash use Google Analytics to measure site metrics for our hosting and marketing clients, and have been transmitting this data securely on the majority of our sites already. With the new security changes, now all Gambit Nash sites with Google Analytics are securely transmitting user data.
Gambit Nash have been offering HTTPS (SSL) secured hosting with HSTS as standard for some time, and we can retro-fit this security to existing unsecure websites also.
Do you have privacy concerns when using the web? Let us know in the comments!