9 Sept 2026 · GA4 · medium severity · fix verified 17 Sept 2026
Dashboards arrive in Google Analytics, and every published dashboard is shared with the property
What's new in Google Analytics: "Dashboards are now available in Google Analytics. Dashboards are a highly flexible way to help businesses view their KPIs on a single report." The help article adds the limits: "Standard properties are limited to a maximum of 15 cards per dashboard, while premium properties support up to 30 cards"; "All published dashboards are shared with the property"; "API support, segments, and card-level comparisons are currently not supported."
What it breaks
Publishing is an access decision: anyone with a role on the property, Viewer included, sees every published dashboard, and there is no per-dashboard access list. A table card on Page location can surface personal data that leaked into URLs to every account on the property. The dashboard article does not say whether No Cost Metrics and No Revenue Metrics restrictions apply to its cards. Dashboards sit in Reports, which include behavioral modeling and (other) rows, so scorecards differ from BigQuery by design. With no API, card definitions cannot be exported or rebuilt by script.
Who it hits: Properties with agency, contractor or cross-team Viewer access; anyone planning to replace a Data Studio KPI report with a native dashboard; teams that reconcile GA4 against a BigQuery export.
The fix
Before the first dashboard is published, clean the property access list, keep URL and free-text dimensions off table cards, check revenue cards from a restricted account, and title each card with what it counts.
fix artifact · #A-014
GA4 dashboard pre-publish checklist (access, personal data, restricted metrics)
Run this before anyone publishes a Google Analytics dashboard: every published dashboard is shared with the whole property, so the checks are about who will see it and what its cards can expose, not how it looks.
- verified_on
- 2026-09-17
- next re-check
- 2026-12-01
- status
- current
Sources linked on every entry · artifacts stamped and re-verified · ← all changes