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Use of Google Analytics declared illegal by French data protection authority

cnil.fr

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Re: Use of Google Analytics declared illegal by French data protection authority

#161

Post by V__ »

Vespasian wrote: post #124
rightbyte wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely Google has presense in France? Why not go after Google directly. It is way easier than processing 1000s of siteowners. Google are the ones spying. The aggregate put on GA dashboard are a minute of the personal info they collect.

Reasons: 1. Legal: It's the site owners integrating GA and therefore taking on the liabilities just like they do with every other supplier. When a part in your car fails immediately after you bought it, it's the manufacturers job to fix it even if they acquired the parts from a third party (e.g. Bosch). 2. Practical: A website 100% located in France and catering to 100% french customers is much more likely to fix the…

> When a part in your car fails immediately after you bought it, it's the manufacturers job to fix it even if they acquired the parts from a third party (e.g. Bosch).

And the manufacturer can go after Bosch, who is responsible in the end.

> than the international anonymous machine that is Google.

Except the law applies to Europe as a whole, and it's really not that much to ask one of the biggest technology companies in the world to use European servers and anonymize European traffic by default. They just don't want to or don't care. Which both should be reason enough to stronger regulate them.

Re: Use of Google Analytics declared illegal by French data protection authority

#163

Post by martin_a »

Dave3of5 wrote: post #133

Don't quite understand this at all. Can we cut through the clickbait and see what's wrong here. If my website askes users for their permission to use GA and they click yes then is that still illegal here? I see this as yes it's still illegal. Also is it illegal because there is an anonymised id number created when you send data. If that's the case then it's not just GA that's a problem but any tracking system i.e. Pl…

> If it's not allowed how can I ensure my site is protected as I need those logs to identify and ban hackers.

Server logs are allowed as "technically necessary" as long as you show "good will" (I'd call it that way) in keeping the saved data to a minimum. 14 days of log keeping? Fine, that's cool for technical reasons. 14 weeks of log keeping? That's excessive and could get you in trouble.

Re: Use of Google Analytics declared illegal by French data protection authority

#164

Post by tyfon »

sfifs wrote: post #83

A lot of this seems to be coming due to US regulations that compel US registered companies to hand over data from subsidiaries in Europe markets if asked by US intelligence and law enforcement agencies. With these various data locality regulations, i wonder if a standard operating approach could be to split tech companies into 3 legal entities, a technology licensing company, a US registered operations company and a…

The EU part cannot be owned by the US entity since the US government can compel the US mother company to have it's subsidiary hand over data.

In fact this is how most of the companies operate already to cheat on taxes.

The way microsoft did it for a while here in Norway was to license azure cloud stuff to a sub operator (EVRY) that is completely insulated except for the licensing agreement.

Re: Use of Google Analytics declared illegal by French data protection authority

#166

Post by JimWestergren »

aftergibson wrote: post #11

Is anyone using an alternative that provides some basic analytics and isn't likely to get me in legal hot water in the future? I've already offloaded Google Fonts due to the German ruling. I'm happy to self-host piwik if needed, but could that fall foul of regulators?

Take a look at Redistats that I built in 2013, privacy policy: https://redistats.com/privacy-policy

Re: Use of Google Analytics declared illegal by French data protection authority

#167

Post by malka »

zoobab wrote: post #132
Fiahil wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is the CNIL actually starting to do its job? IIRC, They got massive funding with GDPR

GDPR enforcement is big business for the government, but no money goes to the poor associations, like LQDN or NYOB. Quite the contrary, those associations have to survive on 'donations', and probably not very high salaries for their staff.

CNIL is not an association. It is part of the french state.

Re: Use of Google Analytics declared illegal by French data protection authority

#168

Post by martin_a »

jurmous wrote: post #31
aftergibson wrote: post #11

Is anyone using an alternative that provides some basic analytics and isn't likely to get me in legal hot water in the future? I've already offloaded Google Fonts due to the German ruling. I'm happy to self-host piwik if needed, but could that fall foul of regulators?

We host Matomo (formerly called Piwik) ourselves. And we also host the fonts we use ourselves. Since we are a healthcare based startup we prefer not to share any data outside of our controlled servers. We even disabled the cookie based tracking inside Matomo at the cost of not linking different visit sessions. Same session visits are fully tracked though. Saves us a cookie warning.

This is the way! Glad you went that way, still struggling to get everything set up like this for our company. But marketing will come around the corner soon... ;-)

Re: Use of Google Analytics declared illegal by French data protection authority

#169

Post by datavirtue »

pyronik19 wrote: post #66
demindiro wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need GA for a website either. Many websites probably don't even need any form of analytics at all.

Do you really think we are in a better place now with GPDR and all these annoying cookie banners all over the place?

Hell yeah. The banners are the fault of the website owner. They don't have to display them.

Re: Use of Google Analytics declared illegal by French data protection authority

#170

Post by XCSme »

Semaphor wrote: post #126
XCSme wrote: post #108

Shameless plug: I have been building a self-hosted-only analytics platform for a long time: https://www.uxwizz.com . It looks like a good time to switch to self-hosted analytics.

Is it really such a rare occurrence for people to want to see statistics for a specific page or compare pages/articles? Because almost all new-wave analytics tools either do not support it, or it’s hidden and not easily discoverable.

Are you referring to stats such as time-spent on a specific page?

From my experience, there are several thousands of people/companies using UXWizz and so far no one has requested this feature yet.

But now that you mentioned, it seems like a pretty useful feature, especially if you can see top performing pages/articles.

I think one reason why people don't care about the specific analytics for a page is that they usually write pages/articles for SEO purposes. To see how well a page is performing SEO-wise, you usually go to Google Search Console (or Bing Webmasters) and see search terms/click-through-rates for that page.

Also, time spent on a specific page is not that useful, typically you want to see: if people are buying stuff, where do people that buy stuff come from and what page do they land on.

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