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Italian watchdog bans use of Google Analytics

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291–300 of 614 posts

Re: Italian watchdog bans use of Google Analytics

#291

There is really no reason to use Google Analytics anymore. There are many great alternatives now, mine is PanelBear.com. Other people love Fathom and Plausible. It’s great to see some unbundling happen.

I also believe (no proof though!) that you don’t need all that micro detail about your users and it is a distraction for a business.

A rough “how many came” is useful. At least to diagnose if the site had problems. Just talk to people and make your thing good!

Re: Italian watchdog bans use of Google Analytics

#292
post #126
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Self-hosting does not automatically make your analytics legal, on the other hand. Processing of your users' personal data is legal only in the few exceptional scenarios outlined in Article 6. https://gdprinfo.eu/en-article-6

Our definition of "exceptional scenarios" is clearly not the same... The list of scenarios in article 6 are common business operations covering a huge range of legitimate activities where processing might need to occur; there is little exceptional about them.

Processing of personal information is unlawful except in the conditions listed in the article.

So "exceptional" in the sense that they are exceptions to a more general rule, as of opposed to the sense of being extraordinary.

Re: Italian watchdog bans use of Google Analytics

#293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ah, the ad hominem , never a good sign for the proceeding argument. there are a number of other office suites that are entirely adequate for bureaucratic organizations to build methodical processes around (which is what bureaucracies do). the capabilities of the underlying tools don’t matter much in this regard. also, audits aren’t meant to prove anything (like security), but instead to shift liability.

The average large organization uses over 100 SaaS products https://www.statista.com/statistics/1233538/average-number-s... I would love to see you replace all 100 of those with open source software. Have you ever dealt with large technology migrations?

so just assuming you have an overpriced stinking pile of sh*t, is this an argument to stay with it forever?

Re: Italian watchdog bans use of Google Analytics

#294
post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that for US- or Italian-based users? What if this is an Italian company running a global website with data from non-GDPR country users?

GDPR covers EU citizens. I don't think it says anything about non-EU citizens.

Which is nebulous: someone whose grandad was Italian living their whole life in the US might be a defacto EU citizen.

Re: Italian watchdog bans use of Google Analytics

#295

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…

If you feel this way I hope you do research before visiting any website at all, because you might accidentally connect to a server in the US and your IP address will be in the TCIP stack of that server and probably the logs too. US servers that are intended to serve US customers have no obligations to you.

Re: Italian watchdog bans use of Google Analytics

#296
post #116
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> just illegal to use in its default state which transmits PII to the US As I mentioned in a sibling comment, this is technically true but complying with GDPR takes more than unchecking a few boxes. I've never seen any GA set-up that would remotely approach compliance. At minimum, you need to mask IP's before they reach Google, which means standing up a non-Google server to proxy all the hits. That is more complexity…

My current understanding of google analytics and GDPR compliance is that you can use it in a GDPR compliant manner without that much trouble. On the older UA there is a simple flag that enables IP anonymization and on the new GA4 there is purportedly no need for it as they don't collect or store the IP at all. For many clients I have set up a cookie compliance tool like Onetrust, which blocks loading of GA and other…

I'm not so sure your take on IP address anonymization. The source states:

    The Italian SA found that the website operators using GA collected, via cookies, information on user interactions with the respective websites, visited pages and services on offer. The multifarious set of data collected in this connection included the user device IP address along with information on browser, operating system, screen resolution, selected language, date and time of page viewing. This information was found to be transferred to the USA. In determining that the processing was unlawful, the Italian SA reiterated that an IP address is a personal data and would not be anonymised even if it were truncated – given Google’s capabilities to enrich such data through additional information it holds.
The Google documentation says:

    The IP-anonymization feature in Universal Analytics sets the last octet of IPv4 user IP addresses and the last 80 bits of IPv6 addresses to zeros in memory shortly after being sent to Google Analytics.
IANAL but I'm pretty sure the IP anonymization setting is no longer an acceptable way of getting GDPR compliance. It may have been acceptable under Austrian or French ruling before, I don't know about those, but from 90 days from now you'll have to explicitly require consent for _at least_ all Italian users.

As a side note, OneTrust has the worst of the worst cookie banners, to the point that I no longer even open websites that have that crap installed. It's also illegal by making it harder to reject tracking than to opt-in, there just haven't been any specific lawsuits about this party yet.

Re: Italian watchdog bans use of Google Analytics

#297
post #12

We are based in Europe and self-host our analytics exactly for this reason. I feel this is just the beginning.

Unfortunately, you can't self-host the integration with Google Ads or Search Console, which locks anyone who relies on Google (or Facebook, Microsoft, etc) Ads into the use of Google Analytics/Ads tracking.

Why not? Can’t you still pass the campaign information via the url?

Re: Italian watchdog bans use of Google Analytics

#298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The average large organization uses over 100 SaaS products https://www.statista.com/statistics/1233538/average-number-s... I would love to see you replace all 100 of those with open source software. Have you ever dealt with large technology migrations?

And if no one does anything, in 5 years it will be a 1000, in 10 years 5000. As it is right now, the only voice governments hear is that of corpos, and corpos want to preserve the influence of corpos. That's why we need to force the ban on corpo influence. I'd rather pay 1% gdp for a one-time migration to open and free software than pay .01% gdp per corp per year.

Are you going to also train staff to use the new open source software? Where is the open source SalesForce equivalent? Workday? Concur? Device management? Email service? ServiceNow? Time tracking? Photoshop? Are you going to also force every employee to use Linux instead of Mac and Windows? Are you going to tell them to rewrite all of their software and business processes written on top of Oracle and SQL Server? Should they also rewrite all of their bespoke mobile apps to support open source mobile operating systems? Are you going to migrate all of their Office documents and SharePoint? Are they going to move all of their project management processes from Microsoft Azure DevOps (aka Visual Studio Online)? Are they going to move all of their call center software to open source? For school systems are they going to move their fuel procurement software? Many education systems are partially funded by the lottery. Are they going to move their backend systems from GTech? Their lunch programs payment systems for students use a third party, are they going to move that too? Their ATS? LMS? Grade tracking software?

Re: Italian watchdog bans use of Google Analytics

#299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Have you researched to know if this site is hosted on a US server? I wouldn't be surprised if it is and I also wouldn't be surprised if your IP address was additionally stored in a log somewhere for a period of time. In the US.

Re: Italian watchdog bans use of Google Analytics

#300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The average large organization uses over 100 SaaS products https://www.statista.com/statistics/1233538/average-number-s... I would love to see you replace all 100 of those with open source software. Have you ever dealt with large technology migrations?

so just assuming you have an overpriced stinking pile of sh*t, is this an argument to stay with it forever?

So do you think open source or the government producing their own software will be better?
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