Live data from Hacker News

Italian watchdog bans use of Google Analytics

gpdp.it

251–260 of 614 posts

Re: Italian watchdog bans use of Google Analytics

#251
post #91

Another decision in a long stream that will make it much harder for EU start-ups companies to catch up to American ones. With absolutely no improvements to actual EU citizen well being.

Isn't this an opportunity for EU startups? By choosing to enforce the law on US companies that EU companies are already generally very compliant with, surely the EU has levelled the playing field for EU companies?

So due to this legislations it is more costly/less profitable for a company to have a European customer compared to US customer. Things like GDPR/lawsuits/bad PR etc. doesn't come for free for companies. So if some startup has more ratio of European users it is at a disadvantage.

Re: Italian watchdog bans use of Google Analytics

#252

i’d support any legislation that booted google, fb, ms, adobe, salesforce, and a whole host of other surveillance tech companies from any and all levels of government. it’s literally as important as the separation of church and state. in fact, i’d love to see a constitutional amendment explicitly separating corporate interests from governmental ones, in all facets of civic life (e.g., campaign finance).

Not only state... I see absolutely 0 reason for my swiss ebanking in the secured web interface to se google analytics and similar trackers. I can clearly see them being blocked by the likes of ublock origin and ghostery in my firefox. Why the f*k should google know where I go in such private matters (and there are tons more, ie if you are lgbtq+ in one of the many restrictive locations, have some less mainstream poli…

exactly, we need to decentralize power, and knowledge (information) is power. it seems innocuous when we each leak a little here and there, but surveillance tech is vacuuming up every tiny bit of it.

living in europe doesn't much matter, given the reach of these companies and their interweaving into government systems, along with reciprocal surveillance agreements (however-many-eyes countries).

Re: Italian watchdog bans use of Google Analytics

#253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is just naive. Government offices/agencies are so tightly coupled with packages like office 365 that forcefully separating them would require home built solutions which would always be terrible, less secure, and more expensive to the tax payer. There’s a lot of good these products can provide, granted they are properly audited and have high security requirements.

Idk here in France there are cities and state-wide administrations with free/libre stacks based on Linux, LibreOffice, Zimbra and others and things seem to JustWork™. For instance the french Gendarmerie, the cities of Rennes and Arles...

Arles is getting suckered by Microsoft, sadly [1]. Unfortunately all it takes is one idiot to get in office once to kill this kind of successful initiative that has been running for almost two decades.

[1]: https://larlesienne.info/2022/02/22/la-municipalite-de-carol...

Re: Italian watchdog bans use of Google Analytics

#254

i’d support any legislation that booted google, fb, ms, adobe, salesforce, and a whole host of other surveillance tech companies from any and all levels of government. it’s literally as important as the separation of church and state. in fact, i’d love to see a constitutional amendment explicitly separating corporate interests from governmental ones, in all facets of civic life (e.g., campaign finance).

This is just naive. Government offices/agencies are so tightly coupled with packages like office 365 that forcefully separating them would require home built solutions which would always be terrible, less secure, and more expensive to the tax payer. There’s a lot of good these products can provide, granted they are properly audited and have high security requirements.

Sounds like it would create jobs too, that's a plus not a minus lol

Re: Italian watchdog bans use of Google Analytics

#255
post #105

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…

Nah, they’ll just slap them with a fine now again as a substitute for direct taxation and let them do what they do basically unchanged. Once the Europeans have to use a foreign proxy to see the regular internet, like the Chinese, then we will have a real discussion on online privacy.

We already do.

Re: Italian watchdog bans use of Google Analytics

#256
post #105

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…

Nah, they’ll just slap them with a fine now again as a substitute for direct taxation and let them do what they do basically unchanged. Once the Europeans have to use a foreign proxy to see the regular internet, like the Chinese, then we will have a real discussion on online privacy.

Have you tried to go to rt.com hany time recently?

Re: Italian watchdog bans use of Google Analytics

#257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is just naive. Government offices/agencies are so tightly coupled with packages like office 365 that forcefully separating them would require home built solutions which would always be terrible, less secure, and more expensive to the tax payer. There’s a lot of good these products can provide, granted they are properly audited and have high security requirements.

Sounds like it would create jobs too, that's a plus not a minus lol

"Creating jobs" to inefficiently solve a solved task is not a good thing, it is society burning it's tax income. It is only good to create jobs when the output of those jobs is increased value.

Re: Italian watchdog bans use of Google Analytics

#258

Good. US citizens should be, at least, disappointed that their government is so bad at protecting their privacy, that US law is so far behind the times. To those companies and people who find these EU decisions baffling or inconvenient: tough. If you had had respect for your users this would not be an issue. You would already not be spying on them. To website visitors: if you see a cookie banner, the site is asking p…

> To website visitors: if you see a cookie banner, the site is asking permission to spy on you. Or you know...count how many unique visitors they have and how to make the site more useful. Do you avoid using cookies on this site but still manage to log in?

Do you know the difference between cookies and a cookie banner? Do you understand why this site can have login sessions, and even keep track of the number of unique visitors, yet is not required to have a cookie banner?

Re: Italian watchdog bans use of Google Analytics

#259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> To website visitors: if you see a cookie banner, the site is asking permission to spy on you. If that concerns you, close the tab. There was a recent ACM article on this. They found there was a large number of sites that don't actually ask permission for anything, they are simply informing you of the spying. Not surprisingly, the ones that did allow modifying cookies were all setup in a predatory fashion which disc…

It’s because they’re allowed to use the word “cookies” for it. If they were required to use specific wording, like for instance “injecting surveillance artefacts” people would probably care a bit more.

Hardly. It's like the requests for administrative rights in Windows Vista, or the installers with many browser addon bars...

Nice idea in theory, but if it's too frequent the awareness will, at some point, just disappear.

Re: Italian watchdog bans use of Google Analytics

#260

Well HN, how about a badge for links indicating whether it uses ga? We have to start somewhere don't we? Or we'll continue to see the web decline. Actually, from my PoV, it might be too late already. Maybe it's just me or people in EU being harassed with banner popups, but I hardly go to any link anymore, and so do many other people I know. It's just not worth it.

A bit individualist solution but you can block it with NoScript on your browser
Post reply on HN