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Italian watchdog bans use of Google Analytics

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Re: Italian watchdog bans use of Google Analytics

#431

Post by tgv »

DisjointedHunt wrote: post #419
cm2012 wrote: 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.

The EU hasn’t shaken off their roots in monarchy. Using the power of the state to go after a single private entity since they have a blood feud with said entity and are now finding all sorts of excuses to hit them economically. I’ve been following the cases with regard to privacy in the EU and it’s a complete joke. You have all these onerous rules against any web technology making it near impossible for startups to f…

You may be looking at this through a very narrow, heavily politicized lens.

First: GDPR is a compromise, so it's a bit uneven. That's partly due to lobbying by google and friends. Second, privacy very much needs protection. Even if you are perfectly fine giving up your privacy, other people aren't. Third: you can actually process user requests. Depending on how you do it, you don't even have to show a banner. Is that really too intrusive?

Re: Italian watchdog bans use of Google Analytics

#432

Post by suction »

cm2012 wrote: 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.

As an EU citizen, I find it to be a huge improvement to detangle my data from US-American entities. Especially with the election of Trump and January 6th. Maybe Americans haven't fully realized what that meant for US-EU relations for the next hundreds of years. The US is just not a politically stable country until further notice.

Re: Italian watchdog bans use of Google Analytics

#433

Post by DyslexicAtheist »

kixiQu wrote: post #143
digitalengineer wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some time ago Google gave EU admins the option to select a local regional (EU) server. This means the data is not send to the US. But! It’s still nog fully legal as the Google HQ (and thus the US government( can still access all the data.

if anyone is curious about why that gives the govt. access: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLOUD_Act (God willing they repeal it, even if only for the international commerce implications...)

something I'm not getting here. If you buy a EU engineered IoT home appliance that has PII including, whether a user is presently inside their home, then every company I know operating in this market uses US based clouds (what other options are there LOL) to do things like digital twin or device shadows but by using a local availability zone.

So this is very different than GA, but depending on the threat-model can be worse. Also very similar metrics can be gathered from the data as from a GA cookie (are they eating, cooking, showering, watching TV).

CloudAct would (or should) in this case also apply here or what am I missing?

Re: Italian watchdog bans use of Google Analytics

#434

Post by adrr »

rambambram wrote: post #34
tin7in wrote: post #12

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

Congrats. We also chose to do the analytics ourselves. No tracking, no cookie banners, and probably better stats as well. One thing that Google did very cleverly was to only give GA users the search terms that visitors used to end up on their site.

How are you tracking returning users without cookies? Also if it’s multi-lingual, how are you storing the language prefs?

Re: Italian watchdog bans use of Google Analytics

#435

Post by adrr »

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?

How many companies use GA as their only analytics system? It isn’t free. It has a free tier.

Re: Italian watchdog bans use of Google Analytics

#436

Post by erikgaal »

majewsky wrote: post #261
naet wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> For many clients I have set up a cookie compliance tool like Onetrust Every time I've seen a cookie popup from Onetrust, it was obviously illegal because "Reject all" was not the easiest option. It's fine if "Accept all" is as easy as "Reject all", but nothing is allowed to be easier than "Reject all". Have they fixed that yet?

This is actually a setting within OneTrust which has a terrible default. We (had to) use OneTrust on eurovision.tv, but configured it ourselves to have three equally styled options.

Re: Italian watchdog bans use of Google Analytics

#437

Post by fulafel »

dudus wrote: post #365
rgbrenner wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gdpr uses a more expansive definition of personal data, and it includes the IP address and geolocation data, for example.

And to be clear Google Analytics has a setting to "anonymize" the IP address which deletes the last octet of the address and makes geolocation less accurate. Then there's an argument that the IP address still reaches Google servers before it's deleted. But that's just splitting hairs at this point. If Google doesn't process the data with IP the IP address I see no harm. IP addresses are not something that you can cho…

The GDPR is a product of the Snowden revealed pervasive surveillance done by US TLAs. Keeping the data in EU vs sending it over to US under assurances is a big hair.

Re: Italian watchdog bans use of Google Analytics

#438

Post by alexklarjr »

suction wrote: post #432
cm2012 wrote: 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.

As an EU citizen, I find it to be a huge improvement to detangle my data from US-American entities. Especially with the election of Trump and January 6th. Maybe Americans haven't fully realized what that meant for US-EU relations for the next hundreds of years. The US is just not a politically stable country until further notice.

since when EU became politically stable? Last time i checked you were at war with Russia.

Re: Italian watchdog bans use of Google Analytics

#439

Post by justinclift »

lovich wrote: post #249
marcosdumay wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Italian laws do not apply to Google USA.

The Italian market doesn’t have to apply to Google USA either. Companies can always choose to ignore a specific nation’s laws[1], they don’t still get access to that nations markets. At the borders the nation state is the one with the guns and firewalls [1] unless you piss off a nation that can project global power, lol if you piss off China or America

First time I've heard of China projecting "global power". Are there cases of it happening?

Re: Italian watchdog bans use of Google Analytics

#440

Post by jeroenhd »

IX-103 wrote: post #355
jeroenhd wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

When PII includes IP addresses it's kind of hard not to process. How else are you supposed to group metrics over a session (since cookies are also forbidden)? This seems to ban third-party analytics by any US company. The cynic in me feels this is a little convenient in how it advantages EU organizations over foreign ones...

You don't strictly need automated analytics to sell services to foreign customers.

Collecting most if not all analytics is forbidden, for sure, but analytics and metrics aren't inherently required for businesses.

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