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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

#591

Post by ApolloFortyNine »

zelphirkalt wrote: post #386
M2Ys4U wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Also wondering if there is a way to agree to storing my data in the us. Consent is always a valid legal basis for the processing, or transfer, of data. But it has to be freely given, specific, informed and unambiguous.

Yep, and that means, that showing a huge, not easily dismissable popup basically demanding consent, just to watch a video or read an article, for which no tracking or cookies are necessary technically, is not really asking for consent and should be illegal.

Unless the only way for online services to survive is with these targeted ads. Untargeted ads pay a tiny percentage of what targeted ads do, and I'm unsure things like free video hosting with unlimited bandwidth would last long without them.

And though hacker news likes to be extreme and say "good" to things like this, there is an unbelievable amount of freely available information on the internet. If you had to pay a subscription by site, how many sites would you be willing to pay for? More importantly, how many would the average person pay for?

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

#592

Post by cyral »

ajvs wrote: post #484
cyral wrote: post #439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the alternative? We are going to go back to 2005 where we send docs over email? Files end up being too large, nobody knows what the latest copy is, etc.

Do you genuinely think they're the only office products providers in the world?

No, do you think they were going to list every single office product? They said "Cloud services" which encompasses more than just those two.

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

#593

Post by seiferteric »

Random thought, maybe totally off base. This is Europe, so not equivalent but there seems to be a lot of people in the US as well who want private companies to be compelled to respect your privacy (4th amendment) but also many people who don't think websites should or could be compelled to respect your freedom of speech (1st amendment), I wonder if there is an overlap in these groups...

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

#594

Post by KingOfCoders »

riddleronroof wrote: post #253
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.

Agree. That also means no new US or EU company has a chance to go across the pond. BigCos can set this up. Not so easy for a small startup.

How does this hinder an EU startup to expand to the US?

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

#595

Post by ApolloFortyNine »

YXNjaGVyZWdlbgo wrote: post #137
acnops wrote: post #129

AFAIK, this could be pretty disastrous for French businesses that funnel conversion data to Google Analytics, which is then used to optimize their Google Search ads. Switching to another solution for analytics might be ok, but losing the ability to automatically optimize ads based on conversion data is a big pain.

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

This just reads like "local commenter says trillion dollar industry is a sham".

Targeted ads pay loads more than untargeted, and you're essentially saying all those companies paying more are in the wrong. Some campaigns even manage 10-25% click through conversions, when well enough targeted.

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

#596

Post by crehn »

Mountain_Skies wrote: post #535
mediascreen wrote: post #509

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why limit it to the EU? Shouldn't every country have their own AWS, Azure and Google Cloud? I think we underestimate just how difficult it is just to replicate existing services, let alone keep up with the innovation. It's like the Argentinian effort to stimulate its own computer manufacturing by banning Apple products.

It'd help if the United States wasn't allowed to aggressively brain drain most of the rest of the world.

It’d help if the rest of the world tried to aggressively prevent brain drain by making the respective countries more attractive for work.

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

#597

Post by eulenteufel »

einpoklum wrote: post #479
nickpp wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google's CEO has pretty much ZERO powers over me. The USA government is (largely) democratic and (mostly) obeys laws. But my government... is not the one I voted for and I trust it 0%. Because I do not live in the West but in one of the great majority of countries with a corrupt, abusive government. The democratic governments of the West are the exception, not the rule.

> 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…

> it's a federal republic rather than a democracy...

Germany is both a federal republic and a democracy and I would argue the the USA are too. Both countries ultimatively derive their legislation from the general populace and are representative democracies.

I've seen the claim you made several times, but every time I try to look it up I fail to understand it.

What is your reason to think a federal republic would exclude democracy?

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

#598

Post by sdoering »

estaseuropano wrote: post #536
mediascreen wrote: post #496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I already get a lot of "We are sorry, but for legal reasons we are prevented from providing this service where you live" when I'm accessing American websites. Recent European judgements seems to make it illegal to embed content from YouTube or Vimeo for example. I don't see how dividing services up by region will help me anyway. I'd rather be able to choose from a few (I imagine there are more than a few at the momen…

Its not illegal, but it requires consent. Plenty of solutions to offer a video without loading third party code until the user clicks it.

You could also use something like 'embetty' [1] and proxy your users from YouTube, Twitter and the likes to ensure their privacy.

[1] https://github.com/heiseonline/embetty-server

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

#599

Post by brianwawok »

wongarsu wrote: post #534
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…

> like AWS, Azure, Mailchimp, PayPal etc [...] No cloud services, no Office 365 or Google Workspace. Maybe an unpopular opinion, but imho AWS, GCP and Azure are popular with startups because of their generous free credits, not because they are good tools for startups. As a startup you are typically better served by a DigitalOcean-level of complexity, and there are plenty of such offers in the EU (Hetzner Cloud, Grids…

> As a startup you are typically better served by a DigitalOcean-level of complexity, and there are plenty of such offers in the EU (Hetzner Cloud, Gridscale, OVH, etc)

As an actual startup founder who started as a 1 man startup, strongly disagree.

Spent maybe $200 a month on Google Cloud, got an actual production ready cluster. Scaled up to Millions in revenue, never had to deal with any Linux Server admin BS.

More time on business, less time on Linux Sysadmin.

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

#600

Post by ApolloFortyNine »

TomGullen wrote: post #560
openplatypus wrote: post #382

Luckily there is plenty to choose from. We entered the market recently with Wide Angle Analytics https://wideangle.co . But there is plenty alternatives. Depending on your needs. Some focus on visuals, we focus on filters and soon attribution. There is more on the list: https://european-alternatives.eu/category/web-analytics-serv... Competition is a healthy thing. You DON'T HAVE TO use Google Analytics :) And if you…

So what primary key does WideAngle use to track users across sessions? It mentions anonymised IP? Isn't that what Google do? You mention you store anonymised IP's "Unlike some other vendors, our anonymization process is not reversible.", what is the methodology here?

Since most people are still on ipv4, does this even mean anything? You'd need the salt stored in some way to reproduce hashes at all, and creating 4 billion hashes to find an ip won't take any meaningful amount of time. Even with a high cost algorithm, if the government requires finding the ip (because honestly Google wouldn't care here, the unique identifier is what they need), they'll be able to find it. If it's a truly irreversible hash, it would also be impossible too link up two separate requests no?
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