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Use of Google Analytics declared illegal by French data protection authority

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

#221

Post by im3w1l »

iamacyborg wrote: post #140
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…

> 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. Yes, because you're still passing personal data to the USA, which means US intelligence services can access it.

If my website is hosted on a server located in the US, then is this illegal? Serious question. Assume it's a static site and that I don't collect any data myself whatsoever. But who knows what the server operator could be doing covertly?

If this doesn't cut the internet in two, I don't get where the line goes.

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

#222

Post by shadowgovt »

datavirtue wrote: post #169
pyronik19 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But they do, and it's terrible.

I feel for my European brothers and sisters these days. As an American, I hardly ever see these banners. Went to an EU country for work and... Holy cow. Y'all get these banners every site. How do you tolerate it?

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

#223

Post by lopis »

jdrc wrote: post #200

While i think these rulings are interesting in the sense of providing an opening to EU-grown businesses (if not too late), it does have a comical dimension in it. "Private" information is everywhere, it's in your DNS queries, which also gets propagated to servers in the evil US empire. Are we going to legislate DNS out of existence too? The EU seems to like having a completely private internet, but that's not gonna b…

> Are we going to legislate DNS out of existence too?

No, but we could ban ISPs from being allowed to log DNS requests. There's lots of things the ISPs are doing that should not be allowed. It's done completely without our consent. If regulating DNS would have as consequence "to legislate DNS out of existence", then be it.

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

#224

Post by XCSme »

Semaphor wrote: post #194
XCSme wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 usual…

General information. How many views/visitors over time, referrers, etc. I did try to click on the top page lists, but those weren’t links. I found "Add segment" eventually, but at least on the demo page it’s not working (for the pages I tried, eventually I found a page with stats), and the interface is atrocious [0] for finding anything and breaks the site [1]. Our website is not posting articles to get people to buy…

Thanks for the feedback!

I will add the per-page stats to the Roadmap, as I think it's a useful feature.

I agree, the UI can be greatly improved, and it is something that I will be working on soon, especially making sure all the edge-cases are covered.

Regarding the screenshots, the long page-name indeed breaks the UI, but normally you wouldn't search for a specific page including all the query parameters, you would add something like "/pricing*" (so it matches all visitors that visited the pricing page, regardless of the query parameters). I am still not sure whether I should separate query parameters from URL path, I did consider it but many pages use query parameters to display a different page/content (e.g. /article?id=5, where changing the id of the article leads to a completely different page, maybe I could by default exclude all query parameters and then have the option to keep custom an allow-list).

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

#225

Post by viro »

martin_a wrote: post #180
viro wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

source? Since conventional wisdom disagrees with you.

> conventional wisdom You mean what the SEA people tell you? Yeah, we'll all probably be out of business tomorrow, if we don't run the whole Google stack.

No post body was provided.

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

#226

Post by iamacyborg »

Dave3of5 wrote: post #209
iamacyborg wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Yes, because you're still passing personal data to the USA, which means US intelligence services can access it.

Is that the case for any data that is passed into the USA then rather than just GA? So if I hosted my servers in any of the AWS US regions that too would be illegal if they have any personal data in them. In this case personal data is a randomised unique id. So say I have a table of users and all I have is a username and a password and a unique id for the record that's personal data and the customer is not allowed to…

Potentially, yes, though this hasn't been tested in court yet.

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

#228

Post by iamacyborg »

im3w1l wrote: post #221
iamacyborg wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Yes, because you're still passing personal data to the USA, which means US intelligence services can access it.

If my website is hosted on a server located in the US, then is this illegal? Serious question. Assume it's a static site and that I don't collect any data myself whatsoever. But who knows what the server operator could be doing covertly? If this doesn't cut the internet in two, I don't get where the line goes.

Are you hosting and processing personal data (including IP) on your server?

It might be.

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

#229

Post by lopis »

jdrc wrote: post #211
matsemann wrote: post #182

Shouldn't Google etc. go after the draconian US laws making this an issue? I feel most of them try to attack EU or fight the courts there.

is google making a lot of money from analytics?

Maybe not directly, but analytics is what allowed Google to "see" the whole internet, with some help of Chrome. These 2 products allowed Google to track the majority of the internet traffic for the past 15 years.

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

#230

Post by i_am_jl »

Xelbair wrote: post #199
Spivak wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right but the solution is for there to be a treaty between the US and the EU that allows for this. Putting the burden on every foreign company to duplicate their infrastructure is stupid work to solve a human problem.

or USA could just.. stop having such ridiculous law in place.

But is "Wait for a possible but incredibly unlikely series of events to occur" really a solution?
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