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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

#581

Post by xdennis »

mediascreen wrote: post #412

I think we (in the EU) will soon realise the bizarre consequences of these regulations. European startups will not be able to use standard SaaS or PaaS tools (like AWS, Azure, Mailchimp, PayPal etc) if they are based in the US (like most of them are). No cloud services, no Office 365 or Google Workspace. It will take forever to build up a similar ecosystem in Europe and I think most successful European entrepreneurs…

On the contrary, it only forces those providers to have a European presence.

We're not fragmenting the internet by looking after our own interests. This wouldn't be an issue if Americans viewed rights (and in this case privacy rights) as belonging to human being as opposed to Americans citizens. The US's policy is what led to this:

> Agencies shall, to the extent consistent with applicable law, ensure that their privacy policies exclude persons who are not United States citizens or lawful permanent residents from the protections of the Privacy Act regarding personally identifiable information

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EU%E2%80%93US_Privacy_Shield

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

#582

Post by jen20 »

viro wrote: post #255
jen20 wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The argument is not that Google shouldn't hand over data with a warrant if it resides in an appropriate jurisdiction. The argument is that Google shouldn't have the data in that jurisdiction to hand over in the first place unless an individual user has given consent for that.

Why should every US tech company be expected to duplicate its infrastructure in the EU? Google isn't special, this applies to EVERY US-based competitor to GA. This gives EU competitors an unfair advantage.... and that's the real point.

Because the US cannot implement reasonable privacy laws that give basic safeguards to personal information expected by EU citizens (or even UK citizens).

If anything, EU competitors to Google Analytics are at a _disadvantage_ because they can't apply the same lassaiz-faire techniques for US-based customers that US-based companies get away with.

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

#583

Post by ApolloFortyNine »

stickfigure wrote: post #423
jimmaswell wrote: post #384

Quoted post unavailable.

Quoted post unavailable.

It is pretty insane we still allow Chinese companies to enter Western markets when going the other way, the Western company has to partner with a local Chinese company.

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

#584

Post by hutzlibu »

toqy wrote: post #577
pphysch wrote: post #551

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not necessarily, they might have timestamps and register # that could be correlated to build a "unsupervised" profile of a customer. Extreme case: you are the only person that ever buys product X around time Y, so that fact can be used as an anchor to build a profile. You need to be way more paranoid if you want to be a true privacy warrior.

Also be careful not to leave any fingerprints or strands of hair around!

So better not leave your basement at all.

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

#585

Post by FredPret »

M2Ys4U wrote: post #261
can16358p wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This! GDPR is a big block towards technological improvement. Do virtually any business that involves user registration at some point, and now you need to be sure that you're compliant with all those rules, spending limited resources on that to avoid ridiculous fines. It benefits only the big players who has lawyers to know exactly what to do and not, and a nightmare for anyone who tries to grow a small business or ha…

> GDPR is a big block towards technological improvement. It's exactly the opposite. It forces technology to be developed in a way that protects human rights (specifically the right to privacy). Innovation is not automatically good if you're innovating in the wrong direction. Think of it as a vector, not a scalar.

I was anti-Brexit when it happened, but am beginning to see the wisdom of it.

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

#586

Post by tremon »

cdot2 wrote: post #421
VikingCoder wrote: post #392

If someone adds http://blah.us "> to their website, and that image is hosted in the United States, how does that not also violate French data protection? The user's browser makes a request to a US server, including the user's IP address. I legit do not understand how to make French people happy with these laws.

I've been having to remove google fonts because we had some germans say we're breaking their laws by using them

Why remove them? Why not proxy/cache the fonts from your own server?

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

#587

Post by toqy »

youngtaff wrote: post #548
mwint wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> any data what-so-ever sent to a 3rd party without my knowledge or consent is too much So do you want “we want to load JS from a CDN like literally everyone does, is that okay” popups on every website?

You should self-host 3rd-party libraries for performance and reliability reasons anyway - reduces the number of TCP connections - reduced the risk of failure if the relevant edge node can't be reached Browsers don't support cross-site caching of 3rd-party content so whatever limited benefits there might have been of using a library CDN are long gone

A CDN isn't about caching jquery and sharing for various domains, everybody knows that doesn't work anymore.

It's about getting jquery physically closer to your users. And sure upload it to your "own" CDN that you pay Azure or whoever for.

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

#588

Post by [deleted] »

mediascreen wrote: post #412

I think we (in the EU) will soon realise the bizarre consequences of these regulations. European startups will not be able to use standard SaaS or PaaS tools (like AWS, Azure, Mailchimp, PayPal etc) if they are based in the US (like most of them are). No cloud services, no Office 365 or Google Workspace. It will take forever to build up a similar ecosystem in Europe and I think most successful European entrepreneurs…

[deleted]

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

#589

Post by shafyy »

judge2020 wrote: post #573
shafyy wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, of course. It's possible that the they will sue every single big company, but quite possible. I think it's a good way for the EU to build pressure against the US to revise the CLOUD act.

This will only happen if the EU makes a true effort to go after as many big US companies as possible. If corporations actually start to lose access to the EU market, the US will follow suit and change its laws.

Godspeed!

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

#590

Post by nickpp »

chaxor wrote: post #564
einpoklum wrote: post #479

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The USA government is (largely) democratic Well, if I may nitpick, it's a federal republic rather than a democracy... More to the point though, there was this study at Princeton U about the correlation between US government policy and popular opinion on a variety of subjects which found that public opinion correlates very poorly with government policy / legislation passed, but opinions among the very-rich correlate…

The effect you mentioned (democratic deficit) is also inversely correlated with unionization (which positively correlates with public engagement with government). So it could be that the reduction in population median household income due to reduction in unionization (and increase in top earner profit / larger inequalities) causes an exacerbation of the effect, with the observation you mentioned.

Under communism unionisation was pretty much complete - but that did not make the dictatorship a democracy by any means.
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