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Hundreds of municipalities, regions and authorities in the country use the Google Analytics tool to collect statistics on the people who visit their website.
The tool has a setting that website owners can enable to force Google to anonymize visitors’ IP addresses before they are saved to the company’s servers.
Ekot’s review shows that some thirty municipalities across the country, including Uppvidinge, and ten state authorities, have tried to activate anonymity, but failed due to typographical errors.
The most common mistake concerns a very small detail. If the websites had written the phrase anonymize IP with a small P at the end, the IP addresses of the visitors had been anonymized. But the phrase has been written with a capital P, and then the anonymization is never activated.
In half of the websites Ekot has found the flaw more than a year ago.
In Uppvidinge, where the bug has been on the municipality’s website for two years, Data Protection Representative Thina Rydell says the municipality will raise the issue with its provider.
– The municipality of Uppvidinge has not realized that this is something that has been happening for a long time.
One of the authorities who has had the error for a long time is the National Institute of Economic Research. Information from Ekot indicates that since the summer of 2018, the authority has sent the IP addresses of visitors without requiring anonymization due to typing error.
At the same time, Ekot can see that since at least August 2020, the authority has promised its visitors that the attitude of anonymizing their information has been activated.
The National Institute for Economic Research does not want to participate in a recorded interview, but after the authority responded for the first time that anonymization certainly works, the authority has now reported everything to the Privacy Protection Authority and writes on its website that anonymization has not been implemented, but should now be corrected.
