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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

#231

Post by xtracto »

estaseuropano wrote: post #63
liveoneggs wrote: post #53

CrUX data will be next. Using to be Chrome considered illegal in Germany.

No, you download chrome. You agree to the analytics when you install/first open it. This is different from going on the site of your local company and feeding data into Google analytics involuntarily. The relevant legislation is about whether or not you agree to data being collected and shared, and the issue is that US companies are essentially data funnels for NSA & co.

So why cant i ask my website users to AGREE on google analytics usage the first time they arrive? Its up to them to accept or not.

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

#232

Post by Dave3of5 »

iqanq wrote: post #153
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 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. The basis of regulations is that citizens are too stupid to consent to things even if they are fully informed. Whether that is a good or bad approach is up for debate.

If this is actually true I think it has far reaching implications. I have many questions about this approach but lets take it slow for the French example:

* Is there a list of these "things" if not how is anyone to know?

* Who is policing this ?

* How do you get advice in your own language (not French google translate does a terrible job at translating lawyer speak)?

* What are the consequences if you don't comply ?

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

#233

Post by AdriaanvRossum »

For who needs a summary of what is happening in the EU [1]

1. Since 2020, it's illegal to send personal data to the US because of the invalidation of the Privacy Shield [2]

2. Google said it was okay in the EU to use anonymized IP addresses

3. The Austrian Data Protection Authority (DSB) [3] ruled differently and waived most of the arguments raised by Google. The DSB ruled that even anonymized IP addresses are personal data.

4. The Data Protection Authority of The Netherlands followed by implying that the use of Google Analytics might be banned in the future [4]

5. Now, the Data Protection Authority of France (CNIL) followed

This is a sound decision, but not a new one. It's a confirmation of what has been ruled in July 2020, but now it seems to have more impact.

PS: I'm the founder of Simple Analytics [5] - the privacy-first analytics tool that, unlike other privacy tools, does not use any identifiers.

[1] https://blog.simpleanalytics.com/will-google-analytics-be-ba...

[2] https://iapp.org/news/a/the-schrems-ii-decision-eu-us-data-t...

[3] https://www.data-protection-authority.gv.at/

[4] https://autoriteitpersoonsgegevens.nl/nl/onderwerpen/interne... (in Dutch)

[5] https://simpleanalytics.com/

EDIT: changed "PII (personally identifiable)" to "Personal Data"

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

#234

Post by iamacyborg »

viro wrote: post #149
YXNjaGVyZWdlbgo wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't really matter micro targeting is not effective.

source? Since conventional wisdom disagrees with you.

This is a good take on the issue.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/advertising-does-create-deman...

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

#235

Post by Semaphor »

TekMol wrote: post #103
wizzwizz4 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google Analytics is hugely overrated. Most people don't use it properly, many browsers block it entirely , and you can usually do a better job just by looking at server logs.

Saying so just tells me that you never been analyzing and optimizing websites with millions of users. Websites on which a whole company depends on. It would be a crazy approach to try and do it via server logs.

But GA is indeed not very useful for many questions. FF blocks it by default.

We use server-side stats and for last month I get 30.1% Chrome, 28.8% FF. Now when I compare that to GA: 40% Chrome, 16% FF…

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

#237

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…

Could you list a few of the per-page stats that you would want to see? I can only think of time-spent, which I think I could simply display in the top pages list.

You can already see sessions count for a specific page using the current segment feature, just add that page name to a new segment, and you can see the count of sessions that saw that page and the referrer (for that specific visitor though, not necessarily that specific page).

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

#238

Post by jen20 »

nickpp wrote: post #184
FridayoLeary wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The industry standard is to show utter contempt for the user. It's expected that every site will show you tacky and distracting ads and will dump 90 third party cookies on you. It's beyond belief. Imagine going into a travel agent to inquire about a flight. The moment you step through the door 50 people attach themselves to you. Some start recording your every action in a notebook, others flash torches in your eyes,…

Imagine there is another travel agent not doing all that, but it costs money while the first is free. Wouldn’t you like to have the right to choose which one to visit, or do you prefer that choice to me made for you by politicians instead?

I would absolutely like the ability to pay for services which do not track or advertise to me. But they don't exist for the most part, and the existence of those services does nothing to diminish the requirement of the ones engaging in poor practice to make their service "free" to obtain _consent_ for what they are doing.

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

#239

Post by NLMichel »

calyhre wrote: post #34
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?

I've been using [Plausible]( https://plausible.io ) in its self-hosted version for about a month, on a 7M+ page views per month. So far so good

The powerful thing about GA is the link with Google Ads, does that work nice for Plausible as well?

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

#240

Post by [deleted] »

tyfon wrote: post #164
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.

[deleted]
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