Let me allay those concerns.
That would be section 7/8.1 of the terms (depending on which when you are reading) which reads
> You will not (and will not allow any third party to) use the Service to track, collect or upload any data that personally identifies an individual (such as a name, email address or billing information), or other data which can be reasonably linked to such information by Google.
Per Justin Cutroni an Analytics Evangelist at Google:
> To add Google Analytics data to a data warehouse you need to add some type of primary key to Google Analytics. In most of the work that I’ve done this key is a visitor ID. This anonymous identifier usually comes from some other system like a CRM. […] I know what you’re thinking, “You can’t store personally identifiable information in Google Analytics!” But this isn’t personally identifiable information.
Basically the definition of personally identifiable in this context doesn’t mean information that can be used by you to you figure out which user is which user but rather information that if a third-party looked at it would tell them which user is which user like an email or a name or their address. Therefore a WordPress user ID it is not a piece personally identifiable information.
Indeed in Google’s documentation for Universal analytics personally identifiable is defined as:
> personally identifiable information (PII) to Analytics (such as names, social security numbers, email addresses, or any similar data), or data that permanently identifies a particular device (such as a mobile phone’s unique device identifier if such an identifier cannot be reset).
https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/2795983?hl=en
Finally, on a documentation article for AdSense Google actually recommends sending a user ID in an example as an alternative to sending a users email. See
https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/6156630?hl=en with the example of an email address in the URL and the corresponding solution section.
> Solution: In most of these cases, the PII in the URL can be replaced with a unique site-specific identifier (background) or a UUID. For instance, site.com/settings/[email protected] could be changed to site.com/settings/43231, where 43231 is a number that uniquely identifies the account with address [email protected].
In this case the UUID we want to use is the WordPress user ID.
To answer yrjasz’s question WordPress automatically assigns logged in the user is a user ID which is a static number associated with their user account. We will automatically send this number if you choose to use this custom dimension.
