Living in Dark Ages

Google is the master of giving away free stuff?in exchange for?people letting Google know everything we do on the Internet.

You get your free search. In return, you see ads that are hopefully relevant to your query. Also subsequently, you will see the same ad on any webpage you go to after that.

Every company wants to know as much as possible about the visitors on their website. They want to track the interaction to a minute detail. That service is provided by Google in the form of?Google Analytics?and its tracking Universal Analytics ID (UA). For this free service, Google helps you to know:

• where the traffic to your website originates
• which search term brought the visitor
• which pages were visited
• how your visitors ended up on your 'buy now' page
• and much more

This free service is highly useful and no company which is serious about its online presence can live without it. That helps Google keep its dominant position in the marketplace.?

Some upcoming changes might affect how you do business. They’ve actually been in the works for a little while.

In 2020, Google announced a new version of this analytical tool called Google Analytics 4 (GA4). And last month (March 2022) it announced the?sunset of UA?by July 2023. That, without any detail, sounds like an expected way of life. New things come along, old things go away. Except ... the data collected by UA are not compatible with the new GA. To top that off, Google will eventually remove access to the UA data which it has collected over the years.

Imagine that your business is highly cyclical. You need to compare today's activity to the activities from a year ago. If you don't switch to the new system by July 2022 - in about three months time, you are out of luck.

Time is running out.

Yes, you can download all your data from the past, but then you have to build all the reporting somewhere else. Another problem is that the way Google is tracking sessions and visitors with?the GA. It doesn't align with the old way of capturing data.

I venture a guess that most companies will switch from the old UA tracking to the new GA tracking just before the deadline. These companies will try to recreate all the reports and will forget the old data. Downloading the data, migrating it and trying to create any continuity won't be worth the effort and money. The past will get lost and forgotten.

I bring this up not to single out Google, but to point out how difficult it is to carry our digital past forward.

In the good old days, before computers, we had archives and people who managed them. We had paper documents and we had a system to categorize them. We still get excited when we discover ancient scrolls that can give us insight into how past civilizations lived. But today, we have a hard time finding an email or text or Slack note from a week ago.

There have been many Dark Ages when knowledge is lost or forgotten. In this case, technology is helping us to forget the past much faster. Ironically, we are creating a new Dark Age. This will be a period which future generations will know little or nothing about.

We hear these days a lot about how we are living in unprecedented times. Actually, the only unprecedented thing is the use of the word 'unprecedented'. Recurrent patterns keep happening. But if we let go of too much information, we won’t be able to recognize them.