French watchdog says Google Analytics poses data privacy risks

Google Analytics, the world's most widely used web analytics service developed by Alphabet's Google (GOOG), risks giving U.S. intelligence services access to French website users' data, France's watchdog CNIL said on Thursday.

In a decision targeting an unnamed French website manager, the data privacy regulator -- one of the most vocal and influential in Europe -- said the U.S. tech giant hadn't taken sufficient measures to guarantee data privacy rights under European Union regulation when data was transferred between Europe and the United States.

"These (measures) are not sufficient to exclude the accessibility of this data to U.S. intelligence services," the regulator said in a statement.