For years, Google Signals has sat quietly in Google Analytics 4’s (GA4) admin panel. When enabled, this toggle allowed Google Analytics to link user behavior across devices using signed-in Google account data. Many organizations assumed it was the key lever controlling how their analytics data fed into Google Ads. That assumption is about to stop working.
Starting June 15, 2026, Google will consolidate data controls across GA4 and Google Ads. The Google Signals setting in GA4 will no longer control Google Ads cookie and ID collection. This will now be fully managed by Google Consent Mode, specifically the ad_storage parameter. The change is technical on the surface, but the compliance implications run deeper than most organizations realize.
What’s changing
After June 15, Google Signals will only control signed-in user data for behavioral reporting and user recognition within GA4 itself. Consent Mode’s four core parameters – ad_storage, ad_user_data, ad_personalization and analytics_storage – become the single control point for all Google Ads data flow.
Turning off Google Signals will no longer stop data from flowing into Google Ads. If ad_storage is granted, advertising features, including cross-device user recognition, can proceed regardless of what the Signals toggle says.
Why this matters beyond the technical aspects
Previously, cross-device tracking felt like a feature you had to opt into through a GA4 setting. Now it’s tied directly to consent, which is clearer, but it also means the impact of a single consent click goes further than users might expect. Granting consent for ads enables a broad set of advertising capabilities, including the ability to link a user’s behavior across their phone, laptop and tablet. There’s no separate consent for cross-device linking specifically.
What this means for the EU
For EU organizations, this is a direct compliance consideration. Under GDPR, consent must be specific and informed. Users expect granular control over how their data is used. Bundling cross-device tracking into a single ad consent signal does not meet that expectation.
What this means for the US
For US organizations in regulated industries, especially healthcare, the stakes are even higher. When health-related interactions can be linked to identifiable users across devices via a single consent grant, the risk of unintended data exposure under HIPAA increases. Without a CMP in place, there’s no user-preference-based control mechanism left once the change takes effect.
Google’s data modeling gap
As consent requirements tighten and identifiers become harder to rely on, GA4 increasingly uses machine learning to model behavior for users who decline analytics cookies, based on similar users who accept them. Google is not fully transparent about how this modeling works or how widely it is applied.
This creates a harder question than accuracy alone. If declined-consent data participates in machine learning models, it becomes difficult to credibly claim that non-consenting users are truly invisible to the system. Anonymous tracking and machine learning-based inference are hard to reconcile. For organizations operating under strict consent requirements, that ambiguity creates a serious compliance concern.
Organizations that need reliable, compliant data can’t base important decisions on statistical estimates. That’s not a configuration problem you can fix with better settings; it’s a structural limitation.
What Piwik PRO does differently
Piwik PRO was built around the idea that privacy compliance and data quality should go hand in hand. Instead of filling consent gaps with modeled data, Piwik PRO retains real, observed data through anonymous and session-level tracking, even when individual user consent is limited.
Piwik PRO also gives you clear, granular control over what data you collect, who it’s shared with and how it’s used. Your analytics data stays yours, and an ad platform’s consent architecture is not quietly overriding it.
The June 2026 change effectively narrows GA4’s role. It becomes an analytics tool judged on its own merits, no longer bolstered by a special advertising data advantage. With that advantage gone, Google Analytics has to compete on the basics, like usability, data quality and control. That’s a comparison Piwik PRO is well-positioned to have.
See how Piwik PRO gives you full control over your analytics data without compliance trade-offs:
