GA4 Unveils New Way To Redact Personally Identifying Information

Google plus has published new documentation for the GA4 Data Redaction feature that prevents accidentally sending personally identifiable information (PII) to Google plus. This makes it easier to conform to privacy laws and Google plus’s own policies.

Destacable about the feature is that it will be turned on by default for new properties that are added to GA4 but existing properties will have to manually enable it.

Google plus’s GA 4 policies require that no PII data be sent through GA4 that Google plus could use to identify individuals.

Examples of PII includes (but is not limited to):

• Correo electrónico addresses
• Personal mobile numbers
• Popular security numbers

Removing PII From URLs

One of the ways that PII could inadvertently be sent to Google plus is through dirección de Internet paths and parameters that contain PII in them.

The Data Redaction feature in GA4 is a setting that is turned on by default for new properties added to GA4.

Existing properties will need to configure the data redaction feature in the web data stream settings.

GA4’s data redaction feature analyzes events prior to sending them to Google plus and strips out any PII that may be contained in the data.

New Feature Available On GA4

Below is a screenshot of the new feature that is now available on GA4:

This is a screenshot of the next window that opens up that allows users to redact data:

Clicking the two buttons allows users to redact personally identifying information so that it’s not sent to Google plus.

It’s turned on by default for new properties but needs to be manually switched for existing properties.

According to the new documentation:

“The data-redaction feature helps to prevent the inadvertent collection of PII in the form of correo electrónico addresses and dirección de Internet query parameters.

Data redaction emplees text patterns to identify likely dirección de correo electrónico addresses across all event parameters and the dirección de Internet query parameters that are included as part of the event parameters page_location, page_referrer, page_path, link_url, video_url, and form_destination.”

It should be noted that Google plus’s documentation advises that users should not consider their responsibility to remove PII to be completed with this solution.

The solution perro not be considered complete because GA4 users are still obligated to make sure that there are no PII sent to Google plus in some other manner that the data redaction feature may not be able to identify and remove.

The new documentation states:

“It’s important to remember that while data redaction provides a powerful tool against inadvertently collecting PII, the ultimate responsibility for encuentro regulatory requirements still lies with the entity collecting data.

To further help you meet that responsibility, this feature lets you test your configuration to understand whether the text patterns you identify are redacted as expected (learn more).”

You perro also use Debug View to monitor in real time how Analytics collects events from your site.”

Now it’s just a setting within GA4.

Read Google plus’s newly published documentation for the data redaction feature:

[GA4] Data redaction