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Do cookie-free analytics need cookie banners?

jfagerberg.me

41–50 of 88 posts

Re: Do cookie-free analytics need cookie banners?

#41

> Note: I am not a lawyer. > We’ll be focusing our efforts on the ePrivacy Directive, The author doesn't seem to know that an EU Directive is not binding law. They're mostly irrelevant. It only matters how member states implement Directives. Some states like Germany didn't change any laws at all regarding the EPD. EU Regulations like the GDPR are different.

The author clearly states they are aware of this and links to an analysis of the implemented laws:

“Note that this is a directive, not a regulation, meaning it is up to the individual EU countries to implement the directive into law. We’ll arbitrarily ignore this distinction, and I will only be considering the wording of the directive itself in this article.

If you’re interested, the guys over at Matomo have done the hard work of looking at the implemented laws. Worth a read!”

Re: Do cookie-free analytics need cookie banners?

#42
post #8

Do you really need analytics that much? Enjoy my cookie and analytics free website: https://www.ZoneHero.io I had to resist a lot of temptations, but hey, no banners!

Totally unrelated to cookies, but: Looks like a nice product! Have you figured out a way to integrate with ECS / Fargate? That's where our high volume ALBs are pointed at.

Re: Do cookie-free analytics need cookie banners?

#43

This is a world I am very familiar with in my day job. IP address is pretty definitively regulated as PII under GDPR rules. Our lawyers consider that any sort of hash or other derivative would still be PII, and thus require consent. (While it's theoretically possible to do analytics on someone without an IP address, browser fingerprinting alone has a half life of ~24 hours. It's not a reliable enough indicator for an…

> At the end of the day, TCP/IP is inherently a non-anonymous protocol, as fundamentally as your home address is known to the mail system

Yes. And the irony is that the German "privacy purists" use the non-private system of having your actual name in post boxes instead of apartment numbers

It would be so funny if they shot themselves in the foot with it, but it's not going to happen unfortunately

Re: Do cookie-free analytics need cookie banners?

#44

What if I only use the first two parts of the IPv4 address and nothing else. Does that still require banners?

As with all legal questions (IANAL): it depends. Can you demonstrate legitimate interest for "using" those parts of the IPv4 address? If yes, then no.

The IPv4 address combined with a timestamp identifies the typical person almost uniquely. Tracking this data over time allows narrowing it down further. This makes it PII for all intents and purposes.

Anonymizing an IP adress by truncating it is a form of processing. So technically you are "processing PII" which makes this subject to the GDPR. If the result is sufficiently anonymous, any data that is attached to further is probably not considered PII unless that additional data helps de-anonymizing the truncated IP. I guess you could have situations where the first two parts of the IPv4 are sufficiently unique in your data set for it still to be sufficient to uniquely identify a person (e.g. when you know that only one IP had these first two parts in the given context) but that's a freaky edge case.

PII or not, the more important question is what legal basis you have for storing and processing it. Consent is one mechanism and it's what requires "banners" - or really: consent forms, as the legally required default action is "reject all non-essential" even if most implementations blatantly ignore this and pretend otherwise - and note that "essential" here means "not requiring consent".

So if you have a different mechanism, you're golden, although truncating still makes sense given that it complies with the requirement for "data minimization" (i.e. being frugal in what you collect). "Legitimate interest" could for example be security-based. You should also make sure to only store this data as long as actually necessary and err on the side of that duration being shorter than longer.

Re: Do cookie-free analytics need cookie banners?

#45
post #4

This whole cookie banner situation is a disaster. Companies know that you will not accept their cookies and have decided to use the "legitimate interest" loop hole. So if you select reject all cookie, the legitimate interest ones are not rejected unless you go an uncheck them manually. https://old.reddit.com/r/mildlyinfuriating/comments/1cn306c/... Here is an example of what I am talking about, I think some companies…

I regret to inform you that solutions like Ad Naseum are snake oil. Bot-clicks and LLM networks are already pretty pervasive clickers of ads. Most ad networks already have ways of filtering out noisy clicks. And anyone dumping real money into ads will be smart enough to tie their ROI to conversion events, not clicks.

Well the specific profile that they build on me will be a mess. I don’t see many ads and when I receive one it is not very targeted at all as if they don’t know what I actually like and what my real interests are…

Re: Do cookie-free analytics need cookie banners?

#46
post #31
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it will ad noise to their data and make their profile of me a mess and very inaccurate. If they make models from this data it will be fundamentally flawed (Garbage in = Garbage out)

As the other poster told you, they filter it out.

It’s still gonna cost them that click, if every site I go to will cost advertisers money I’m good.

Also if it doesn’t work why did Google go out of their way to make it hard to install? If it was truly harmless to advertisers Google would not have done anything.

Re: Do cookie-free analytics need cookie banners?

#47

This is a world I am very familiar with in my day job. IP address is pretty definitively regulated as PII under GDPR rules. Our lawyers consider that any sort of hash or other derivative would still be PII, and thus require consent. (While it's theoretically possible to do analytics on someone without an IP address, browser fingerprinting alone has a half life of ~24 hours. It's not a reliable enough indicator for an…

> At the end of the day, TCP/IP is inherently a non-anonymous protocol, as fundamentally as your home address is known to the mail system Yes. And the irony is that the German "privacy purists" use the non-private system of having your actual name in post boxes instead of apartment numbers It would be so funny if they shot themselves in the foot with it, but it's not going to happen unfortunately

An address is already PII, whether you pseudonymize it with apartment numbers or not.

Also I think in practice the bigger concern with IPs is that the IP itself is PII at the time you collect it, so you're always processing PII even if the hash or other such "anonymized" data you store may end up not technically being PII if there's no way to correlate it to an actual person after the fact (which wouldn't be the case for a simple hash which can be deanonymized with rainbow tables).

Re: Do cookie-free analytics need cookie banners?

#48

> Note: I am not a lawyer. > We’ll be focusing our efforts on the ePrivacy Directive, The author doesn't seem to know that an EU Directive is not binding law. They're mostly irrelevant. It only matters how member states implement Directives. Some states like Germany didn't change any laws at all regarding the EPD. EU Regulations like the GDPR are different.

The ePD is intended to be replaced by the ePR but the ePD has already been implemented in several countries so it's a good abstraction of those implementations if you don't want to look at the specifics of each one individually.

> Some states like Germany didn't change any laws at all regarding the EPD.

This is false. Germany implemented the ePD[0] by replacing the TKG with the TDDDG in 2021. You may have missed this as it wasn't a big news story and German law still awkwardly refers to "telecommunications" when also talking about the Internet.

> EU Regulations like the GDPR are different.

Yes, that's why the ePR will largely replace the implementations of the ePD by acting as directly binding law for all EU member countries rather than requiring individual implementations.

[0]: https://www.bfdi.bund.de/DE/Fachthemen/Inhalte/Telemedien/eP...

> Nachdem der deutsche Gesetzgeber zuletzt mit einer Novelle des Telekommunikationsgesetzes (TKG) und dem Telekommunikation-Digitale-Dienste-Datenschutz-Gesetz (Telekommunikation-Digitale-Dienste-Datenschutz-Gesetz) zum 1. Dezember 2021 noch die europäischen Vorgaben aus der E-Privacy-Richtlinie in deutsches Recht umsetzte, wird die künftige E-Privacy-Verordnung unmittelbar in den Mitgliedstaaten gelten.

Emphasis added. Highlighted part approximately translates to "the ePrivacy guideline was implemented in German law".

Re: Do cookie-free analytics need cookie banners?

#49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> IP address is pretty definitively regulated as PII under GDPR rules. Our lawyers consider that any sort of hash or other derivative would still be PII, and thus require consent. Probably more helpful to phrase this as Personal Data instead of “PII” as the latter does not appear in the GDPR once and the former is much broader in scope than pii data.

Personal data (while being what GDPR uses) is not as precise. Key is "identifiable". For example "likes french fries" is "personal data" in the general sense but not gdpr since it is not identifiable since you cant figure out who it is talking about. Your name, address, etc is identifiable because it can be tied to a physical person.

GDPR is not concerned with whether or not the data is identifiable. If it is linked to an individual, it is personal data.

In the context of an analytics package, a pageview would be considered personal data because it is associated with an individual user.

Article 4 is pretty clear.

> ‘personal data’ means any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person (‘data subject’); an identifiable natural person is one who can be identified, directly or indirectly, in particular by reference to an identifier such as a name, an identification number, location data, an online identifier or to one or more factors specific to the physical, physiological, genetic, mental, economic, cultural or social identity of that natural person;

https://gdpr-info.eu/art-4-gdpr/

Re: Do cookie-free analytics need cookie banners?

#50
I’m so tired of the popups.

YOY DON’T NEED A POPUP TO USE COOKIES!

Just stop tracking people across sites and you’re good. Cookies, localstorage or fingerprinting makes no difference. The distinction is whether you track users or not.

You are allowed to use cookies to your heart’s content, as long as the cookie is necessary for the functionality of your site, like a session id, or a shopping cart id.

> [You must] Receive users’ consent before you use any cookies except strictly necessary cookies.

What is worse, ALMOST ALL POPUPS ARE STILL ILLEGAL.

Having the decline option hidden behind an extra click on ”Manage Cookies” makes it easier to accept than to decline. You should also be able to withdraw the given consent at any time, But I have never noticed a site with that functionality.

> Make it as easy for users to withdraw their consent as it was for them to give their consent in the first place.

https://gdpr.eu/cookies/

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