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Italian watchdog bans use of Google Analytics

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Re: Italian watchdog bans use of Google Analytics

#101

Post by permo-w »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #82
nwellnhof wrote: post #30

What's really puzzling is that Google Analytics never got banned because of antitrust laws. It's the most obvious example of predatory pricing I've ever seen. How is a smaller company supposed to compete against a free product?

Doesn’t predatory pricing mean “we dropped our pricing below profitability in order to kill competitors (and presumably raise our own prices once they’re dead)”? I think you’d have a very good case against Amazon, and probably Uber/Lyft, and I’ve long wondered why no one sued them over it. But in Google’s case, Analytics is profitable for the same reason Youtube is profitable—Google makes money off the data they gath…

I did hear this in about 2014, so it could well have changed, but I thought Youtube wasn't profitable, or at the very most barely profitable

Re: Italian watchdog bans use of Google Analytics

#103

Post by Nagyman »

raviparikh wrote: post #41
nwellnhof wrote: post #30

What's really puzzling is that Google Analytics never got banned because of antitrust laws. It's the most obvious example of predatory pricing I've ever seen. How is a smaller company supposed to compete against a free product?

I co-founded a company called Heap that competed against Google Analytics and we were quite successful. Amplitude, Mixpanel, and others have also done so. GA’s free pricing was not really a big issue for us and customers were very willing to pay 6- and 7-figures for a differentiated quality product.

Loved Heap (Analytics?). I advocated for it while working at my previous employer :) I think we were early customers. At the time, its automatic tracking of all events was a godsend compared to hooking up specific tracking after the fact using GA events.

Re: Italian watchdog bans use of Google Analytics

#104

Post by freeone3000 »

iLoveOncall wrote: post #83

Those decisions are good in theory, but in practice they will kill the free web. The only people that have the work power to put equivalent alternatives in place are the big corporations, that will anyway find a loophole. I run my small blog, and I can't spend days or even weeks to setup a subpar analytics solution. I won't even start talking about self-hosting an analytics solution which would probably double my mon…

Why does your small blog need an "analytics solution" in the first place, if you earn $0?

Re: Italian watchdog bans use of Google Analytics

#105

Post by naet »

As more and more country specific legal regulations are raised, I wonder who will be the ultimate gatekeepers of the general internet when certain actors behave against the "rules". The current landscape is a complex system of seeming contradictions straddling different levels of public and private, centralized and decentralized, anarchical and moderated, etc.

Will ISPs be forced to cut off traffic from certain areas? Will centralized companies like Google and Reddit be forced to comply with regulations or cut off services in certain areas? Will governments set up firewalls? Will the buck of responsibility be passed upwards to service providers like GA, or downwards to individual site administrators?

Re: Italian watchdog bans use of Google Analytics

#106

Post by iLoveOncall »

freeone3000 wrote: post #104
iLoveOncall wrote: post #83

Those decisions are good in theory, but in practice they will kill the free web. The only people that have the work power to put equivalent alternatives in place are the big corporations, that will anyway find a loophole. I run my small blog, and I can't spend days or even weeks to setup a subpar analytics solution. I won't even start talking about self-hosting an analytics solution which would probably double my mon…

Why does your small blog need an "analytics solution" in the first place, if you earn $0?

Because I want to know where my readers come from, which Google terms they searched, etc.? There's a million reasons to want to know stats like this without earning money...

Re: Italian watchdog bans use of Google Analytics

#108

Post by mxuribe »

baisq wrote: post #74
2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

America is the LTS branch of Democracy.

If a modern democracy requires an ever-growing government I think I will stick to Democracy Stable.

Agreed i'm not interested in "ever-growing"...not for a distro nor a gov...but i am interested in an evolving one for the better - i.e. improve effectiveness, and reduce bloat if it adds nothing of value. ;-)

Re: Italian watchdog bans use of Google Analytics

#109

Post by V__ »

leephillips wrote: post #78
V__ wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It was the client’s decision to spy on its users. Calling it spying is a little far-fetched I think, when the problem was the transfer ip addresses to US servers, not Analytics itself.

Like most people, I have an IP that is unique to me, and will be for weeks, maybe months, until some event causes my ISP to assign me a new one. Google can track and correlate my activity across all the websites that I visit that happen to use GA. In this way they can build a profile. If I used Gmail, they could include information from the content of my email, which they admit their computers examine. With enough da…

Oh, I think I wasn't clear. I meant saying that the client is deciding to spy is a bit far-fetched. Google of course.

Re: Italian watchdog bans use of Google Analytics

#110

Post by rattlesnakedave »

leephillips wrote: post #21
V__ wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> meaning that Google itself does not violate GDPR, but only the websites that use it. This is so baffling to me. Google has subsidiaries in the EU. The fact that it's ok to give a product to a EU client which can't be used in accordance with the law, and the client is responsible, is just idiotic.

I don’t find it idiotic. It was the client’s decision to spy on its users. I have no sympathy for companies who make that decision.

It was the client’s decision to use the service.
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