Conducting page performance optimizations on Google Analytics 4 (GA4) can sometimes lead you to make unexpected discoveries. For example, you might discover that a particular landing page captures users' email addresses in the URL.
Such a scenario is much more than an inconvenience: it carries a potential risk of mishandling personally identifiable information (PII), raising concerns about legal implications for the data stored in GA4.
Luckily, GA4 provides a valuable feature for data management to address such cases: the Data Deletion functionality. This feature allows users to efficiently delete undesired events or user parameters, including specific user data.
When you face this type of situation, you will need to delete the collected data and stop the collection of the unwanted data, here is how:
1. Deleting the collected data-
- Data deletion requests: This allows data deletion based on defined criteria, such as date ranges, specific parameters or events. It can even schedule data deletion for future dates. These features allow a controlled and selective removal of sensitive information based on specific parameters.
- Deletion directly from User Explorer report: GA4's User Explorer tool enables users to identify specific users and delete their data directly from the report. This granular approach allows for a more detailed and precise handling of user-specific information.
- User deletion API: For users seeking a programmatic solution, GA4 provides the User Deletion API. With this feature, data scrubbing can be set up as automatic workflows and streamlined.
2. Make sure you stop the collection from today on.
- Data reduction feature - To stop the collection of unwanted query parameters in your website’s URL, such as Emails, IDs, or any other custom query parameters you use GA4 has a data reduction feature just for that, you can read how to do it here
By using these tools, you can help protect data privacy and make sure your company adheres to all regulations. These tools allow you to easily fix any issue that might pop up when sensitive data is accidentally collected and stored in GA4.
To learn more about GA4’s data deletion options, you can use Google’s documentation:
Important Tip!
GA4 might not be your sole source of data privacy breaches!
If you’ve discovered a data collection breach error - it’s probable that the same data might have also been collected in other advertising platforms and BQ export.
Don’t forget to map out these places - and then check for potential breaches on these platforms as well.
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