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.
That's ok, that's our decision.
Italian watchdog bans use of Google Analytics
351–360 of 614 posts
Re: Italian watchdog bans use of Google Analytics
#352Earlier quoted context omitted.
> To website visitors: if you see a cookie banner, the site is asking permission to spy on you. Or you know...count how many unique visitors they have and how to make the site more useful. Do you avoid using cookies on this site but still manage to log in?
Do you know the difference between cookies and a cookie banner? Do you understand why this site can have login sessions, and even keep track of the number of unique visitors, yet is not required to have a cookie banner?
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Re: Italian watchdog bans use of Google Analytics
#353Earlier quoted context omitted.
> To website visitors: if you see a cookie banner, the site is asking permission to spy on you. If that concerns you, close the tab. I'd love to see how often people do anything besides click okay anyway (I'd be very surprised if it wasn't 99%+).
Unless there is a very simple "reject" button, I click okay. Between Firefox's native protections, DNS-level blocking and uBlock, I have a lot more confidence in my own protections than I do in their honesty, and it's not worth it to me to uncheck a bunch of boxes.
Yeah clicking anything but okay or reject all (which I rarely ever come across) is usually a maze of options no one has time for except some tiny dedicated minority.
Re: Italian watchdog bans use of Google Analytics
#354Earlier 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…
I'm not so sure your take on IP address anonymization. The source states: The Italian SA found that the website operators using GA collected, via cookies, information on user interactions with the respective websites, visited pages and services on offer. The multifarious set of data collected in this connection included the user device IP address along with information on browser, operating system, screen resolution,…
That Google documentation is for the IP anonymization feature of Universal Analytics, which is being sunset in about a year.
Google announced earlier this year that Google Analytics 4, its successor, does not log or store IP address at all.
I don’t know whether UA or GA4 service was the subject of the Italy case, but I would not be surprised if it was UA. Most sites have not switched over to GA4 yet.
Re: Italian watchdog bans use of Google Analytics
#355Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's nothing US companies can do to make themselfes legal to use here. The legal framework in the US allows dragnet spying on every non-american and american companies are forced to participate in that effort.
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...
Re: Italian watchdog bans use of Google Analytics
#356So reading the English text it is not clear what exactly is the unlawful part. Is the fact that data is flowing to US based servers (which I assume is trivially managed by changing GA server location to Europe) or the fact it is flowing to an American Headquartered company, regardless of where the data is flowing to?
Can someone comment if the Italian language text is clearer? Or ehat is in the judgement?
Re: Italian watchdog bans use of Google Analytics
#357Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Using Libre Office rather than Office 365 is unlikely to be the limiting factor in how fast anything in a government office is going to run." Depends. When odf would be the standard maybe, but it isn't. Standard is microsoft office, and libre office is not 100% compatible. But you will still have to deal with lots of microsoft documents, from all the other agencies, ordinary people, companies, .. Meaning, when Munic…
> Standard is microsoft office Then change it. By law if need be, and have all government departments go over to Libre Office at the same time.
Well, that is one solution, but I would not want to have a urgent problem at that specific time.
Re: Italian watchdog bans use of Google Analytics
#358Earlier quoted context omitted.
Using Libre Office rather than Office 365 is unlikely to be the limiting factor in how fast anything in a government office is going to run. In fact, I bet you that a major part of the delays in Government are because Tom from IT needs a sign off from three separate people to get a new Office 365 license for Brenda in accounting. With Libre Office you make that a thing of the past.
"Using Libre Office rather than Office 365 is unlikely to be the limiting factor in how fast anything in a government office is going to run." Depends. When odf would be the standard maybe, but it isn't. Standard is microsoft office, and libre office is not 100% compatible. But you will still have to deal with lots of microsoft documents, from all the other agencies, ordinary people, companies, .. Meaning, when Munic…
I haven't had any issues with Libre Office in years. They even have a paid corporate version with (supposedly) good support.
What I have had more incompatibility issues with is Gsuite (or whatever Google is calling it these days) which a LOT of medium sized businesses and school are using now as an office alternative.
Re: Italian watchdog bans use of Google Analytics
#359Good. US citizens should be, at least, disappointed that their government is so bad at protecting their privacy, that US law is so far behind the times. To those companies and people who find these EU decisions baffling or inconvenient: tough. If you had had respect for your users this would not be an issue. You would already not be spying on them. To website visitors: if you see a cookie banner, the site is asking p…
Pragmatically, to what extent do you believe the European laws have protected Europeans above and beyond how American laws have protected Americans? Basically, what class of badness are Americans subjected to due to behind-the-times data protection laws, that Europeans are protected from?
I believe a part of the data-privacy laws and sentiment in Europe comes both from the WWII and the civil wars/dictatorships/etc that happened across EU. When in our grandparents time (YMMV) the government was compiling list of citizens or checking what they were doing in their private lives, it was not to give them flowers. And while that still sounds pretty far from me, it was also fairly recent in the past so that there's some social residue of the sentiment.
BUT to answer the question directly, credit checks to the level they are performed in the USA sound like a horrifying thing and a total privacy breach for us EU citizens.
Re: Italian watchdog bans use of Google Analytics
#360Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's actually quite simple. The government can buy things services from specific providers, but it cannot force you to buy services from specific providers. In other words, it can buy BMWs for government use, but it cannot say "you have to buy a BMW to enter the municipal office". The same applies to websites. If a government website uses Google analytics, it is essentially requiring you to do business with a specifi…
And if the government uses Cloudflare or GoDaddy or aws it’s requiring you to do business with those companies. This goal is impossible to achieve with any government run service.
It's easy. You just need the government to run fiber to every citizens house so that the can connect directly to the government data center.
Of course some citizens are living over seas so we can provide a satellite uplink for them.