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Italian watchdog bans use of Google Analytics

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Re: Italian watchdog bans use of Google Analytics

#311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not illegal to give things away for free unless it's dumping. Which is exactly my point. "[Dumping] occurs when manufacturers export a product... at a price below the normal price with an injuring effect. The objective of dumping is to increase market share in... by driving out competition and thereby create a monopoly situation" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy) That's exactly what's happen…

> Google prices Analytics at $0 to prevent any competition from starting up. It's not dumping because, in the absence of any competition, the price hasn't changed. It just turns out the market price for this service is $0.

I would say it has more in common with the Microsoft antitrust case. In that they gave IE away for free.

I think you can show Google has monopoly on search and search data and GA is the only analytics allowed to connect with that.

Is it dumping? Yes. They don’t intend to raise the price, but they get paid not in cash but in terms of increasing their monopoly by having so much data on us.

Now a lot of things are like this (anything where you give your email for a discount code). But they are not intended to get a global monopoly or make it impossible for anyone else to do business competing with you.

Re: Italian watchdog bans use of Google Analytics

#312
post #279

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. If that concerns you, close the tab. I'd love to see how often people do anything besides click okay anyway (I'd be very surprised if it wasn't 99%+).

Unless there is a very simple "reject" button, I click okay. Between Firefox's native protections, DNS-level blocking and uBlock, I have a lot more confidence in my own protections than I do in their honesty, and it's not worth it to me to uncheck a bunch of boxes.

Re: Italian watchdog bans use of Google Analytics

#315

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...

Are there any high functioning large companies that use Linux/LibreOffice/Zimbra? I suppose governments rarely aspire to be high functioning.

Re: Italian watchdog bans use of Google Analytics

#316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

arguments can have multiple lines of reasoning, one of which can be an ad hominem all by itself.

None of the lines of reasoning were an ad hominem. From your other comment[1], it seems like you think "ad hominem" just means "being rude to someone". I recommend reading the GP comment's description of ad hominem again: it means making a logical argument that depends on the speaker's personal characteristics. "You're European, so your argument is biased and wrong" is an ad hominem. "Your argument is naive, here's w…

no, an ad hominem need not be literal. do you really not understand nuance in language? we're not computers operating only on singular data and deterministic instructions.

see how those three sentences go together? that's a line of reasoning. the subject comment doesn't have that throughline. it's disjointed; the parts are only tangentially connected.

Re: Italian watchdog bans use of Google Analytics

#317
post #92

The CNIL in France is really pushing companies to not use Google Analytics, and you better listen to them here. It seems US companies should really make changes to how they host/manage data to be able to able to work in EU in the near future. (It isn’t a criticism, simply an assesment).

There's nothing US companies can do to make themselfes legal to use here. The legal framework in the US allows dragnet spying on every non-american and american companies are forced to participate in that effort.

They're perfectly legal if they don't process any PII. If a US company serves static content there's no need to fear the EU; they'll just have to disable illegal external integrations like Google Analytics/Fonts/etc.

A company doing business with other companies might find themselves in a position where they can comply perfectly. Not every company needs to collect PII, though these days every company likes to pretend they do.

Re: Italian watchdog bans use of Google Analytics

#318

At what point do operators just start blocking access from EU countries. It's hard to imagine its worth jumping through all the complexities here at some point.

Bring it on. Anything that disconnects people from the American tech industry and encourages domestic competition is a good thing.

Re: Italian watchdog bans use of Google Analytics

#319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

not sure that it's relevant and 'large' is subjective, but yes, i stewarded the technology migration of a core product suite for a prior employer, which incidentally had government agencies as a prominent customer segment. i'm not suggesting that governments can only use internally developed or open-source software, i'm saying corporate interests should be firewalled away from goverment. so a locally-installed office…

You migrated a product. Were you involved in migrating the entire infrastructure of an entire state? Yes, I speak from experience, migrations and modernizations are kind of my job.

[deleted]

Re: Italian watchdog bans use of Google Analytics

#320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's actually quite simple. The government can buy things services from specific providers, but it cannot force you to buy services from specific providers. In other words, it can buy BMWs for government use, but it cannot say "you have to buy a BMW to enter the municipal office". The same applies to websites. If a government website uses Google analytics, it is essentially requiring you to do business with a specifi…

Could you expand on the definition of "doing business with" an entity that you're using here? It seems quite non-standard. If you open the door to a govt office, are you doing business with the company who installed the doors? If you use the toilet, are you doing business with the company that janitorial services are contracted out to?

No, when you leave that govt office you don't have any link to those companies.

When you visit a site with Google Analytics, they still have your data after you leave.

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