This isn’t legal advice, and your obligations depend on your jurisdiction and setup. But the recurring question from store owners is fair: can I run Google Analytics and stay on the right side of the GDPR? The practical answer is that it’s possible, and it puts a standing compliance job on your plate.
What running GA4 compliantly involves
- A lawful basis — in practice, prior consent for the analytics cookies and identifiers, gathered before GA4 loads.
- A data-processing agreement with Google and a transfer mechanism for data leaving your region.
- Disclosure in your privacy policy of what GA4 collects and who it’s shared with.
- Honouring access and deletion requests for data held in a system you don’t control.
Consent Mode and IP handling reduce the exposure, but they don’t remove the fact that visitor data is processed on infrastructure outside your control.
What changes when analytics is self-hosted
When tracking writes into your own WordPress database and nothing is sent to a third party by default, the “international transfer” and “third-party processor” parts of the problem largely go away. You still disclose what you collect and honour data-subject requests — but now you can actually action them, because the data is in tables you own.
Consent and anonymisation still matter
Self-hosted doesn’t automatically mean “no banner.” GrowVia supports consent-gated tracking — nothing recorded until consent is granted — plus optional IP anonymisation and a retention limit with an automatic purge, so you can configure it to match whatever advice you’re given.
The bottom line
GA4 can be run compliantly with ongoing effort. Keeping the data on your server removes whole categories of that effort. Neither choice is a substitute for reading your own obligations.
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