Companies must stop using Google Analytics

How does the ruling come to that conclusion? How does an ID that uniquely identifies a user but can't be used to trace back to a physical person be PII?

Reading the linked rulings it seems like it's not the IP (even though it's only blanked at the last octet) but rather other cookie values, which may in turn be traceable to the user?

Of course if a cookie value is sent and in some other system that same cookie value is stored next to a user's name, then that cookie value is definitely PII and can't be sent via GA, that much I understand.

The key passage from the longest ruling (DI) seems to be

Dessa identifierare har skapats med syftet att kunna särskilja individuella besökare, såsom klaganden. De unika identifierarna gör därmed besökarna på Webbplatsen identifierbara. Även om sådana unika identifierare (enligt punkt 1 ovan) i sig inte skulle anses göra enskilda identifierbara, måste det dock beaktas att dessa unika identifierare i det aktuella fallet kan kombineras med ytterligare element (enligt punkterna 2–4 ovan) samt att det är möjligt att dra slutsatser i förhållande till information (enligt punkterna 2–4 ovan) som medför att uppgifter utgör personuppgifter, oaktat om IP-adressen inte överförts i sin helhet

Basically: the random ids aren't enough by themselves, nor is the IP, but the IDS together with partial IPs and something else is.

I don't know what the bottom line is though. And that worries me a bit. Any analytics will be at risk of doing this. In my desktop app analytics we blank IPs etc, but just storing some hardware data (ram amount, cpu freq, windows version, screen resolution...) means that we eventually have enough entropy to say with certainty that each user we have has a unique set of parameters in the data we log. It's almost impossible to NOT fingerprint perfectly if you gather even just basic hardware and OS info, for example. But there is of course zero possibility that we could use the data backwards and say "ok which single physical person is it that has a 16 core machine and 16Gb ram" making it "not PII"?

I think the key issue in these cases with GA is that it's more a chain leading to actual PII. E.g. the cookie value that GA has access to, can realistically be stored somewhere where there is also PII such as an email address. And that's enough to violate the GDPR.

I think companies should stop using fixed navigation banners but we can't all get what we want now can we?

Like holy crap, I agree with you but your website is unreadable with that may as well be a banner ad of a navigation bar that keeps popping in and out of existence every time I scroll down.

> I realized that a lot of that wasted time is for providing context, relationship building, and alignment.

A lot of that seems to be about office politics, which historically been something which engineers and office workers in general has disliked. It is a generally unhappy fact that relationship building and office alignments is what dictate who get promoted, who get raises, who get the desired assignments and who don't.

It might be true that those who refuse playing that game is associated with inexperience. In my experience, employees who get tired of it generally leave large companies, which leaves behind only inexperience employees or those who enjoy the game.

> Your run-of-the-mill business drone will be trained on Word/Excel/Outlook and be hard to impossible to retrain on anything else (either because of actual stupidity or resistance to change).

Change purely for the sake of change is bad and people are right to resist it.

The vast majority of businesses have no compelling reason to switch off Microsoft Office. Would the world be a better place if there were more feasible options? Maybe. But that's not the concern of either a random business or its employees.

Home appliance repair is not a specialized job. Maybe you have some sort of memory about the Maytag repair man, but that is just branding, just like DeBeers with their diamond monopoly.

Home appliance repair is knowing the general layout of each major appliance, a bit of specialized knowledge on how to dismantle them without braking them, and which modules are responsible for which function, and finally knowing how to source the replacement parts and knowing which common items are best kept on hand for convenience.

Very few people are doing board level repair for appliances, especially when the replacemeent boards are typically very inexpensive for any modern machine (save for main boards and for induction plates in induction stoves, which are typically so expensive that it is smarter to replace the entire appliance rather than repair the broken module).