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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

#651

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's still legal to ask your bookkeeper to go through the books and give you a list of your 10 best selling products broken down by season (given you have all the right paperwork in place with them etc. but no consent of the customers needed).

Well, it's not necessary to process any personal data in order to calculate that. Can you ask your bookkeeper to tell you the top 3 best selling products for your top 5 customers without declaring that the purpose of the data transfer to the external bookkeeper is also to run sales analytics?

It is necessary to process personal information for that purpose. That's what the sales records are.

> top 5 customers

You probably have to declare that the data is processed for that purpose in general terms but I don't see why consent would be necessary. Anyway, this analytics service claims it doesn't do this kind of analysis.

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

#652
post #644
post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you afraid USA would drone strike or disappear you if they get to your private data? Do you think that is a valid concern for most people?

I'm not worried about most people, I'm worried about the people that the USA does go after, because the USA usually goes after good people who rightfully criticized what they're doing.

> USA usually goes after good people who rightfully criticized what they're doing

With drone strikes and disappearings?! Wow! Do you have an example?

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

#653
post #649

One thing I find super crazy is that, while making a big fuss about IP addresses and cookies, the EU forces any website owner to publicly share his full name, address and phone number on the site’s imprint. If you’re not a corporation or a professional who has an office address, you’ll have to supply your own personal data. Visible to anyone on the internet.

I believe that's a German law, nothing to do with the EU

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

#654
post #579

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like this is either a mis-interpretation, or the scope of this law would prevent 95% of websites from existing in the EU (including hackernews which stores your email). So any US company cannot store PII on an EU citizen? If someone from the EU comes to my site to make a purchase, I can't allow them to do that?

Yes that is my interpretation of it. The whole point being that any data stored in US can not be guaranteed to respect GDPR because the US government can request access to that data and the EU citizens don't have a recourse to that. any US buisness that want to have EU citizens PI needs to have a host in EU.

Not just a host, but the corporation in control of the data can't be controlled by a US corporation at all, lest the US corporation be able to pressure the EU subsidiary into handing over that data.

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

#655

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It will take forever to build up a similar ecosystem in Europe And even then it seems risky the EU will deem the business model entirely in violation of privacy laws. It's very chilling When the EU finally completes their utopian/dystopian ideas of privacy from foreign Internet services, the great firewall of Europe, perhaps then EU regulators will look inward and do the same things? But for now it all has the appe…

What's funny is I don't think of the EU was that high on the privacy list? Doesn't govt slurp up data on its citizens in terms of national health care systems, databases on identity, easy access to online records etc? Is there even a trial by jury in the EU? I thought they had a type of prosecutor / judge that could go rooting around anywhere they want pretty much unchecked.

It’s not about what you collect. It’s about consent and transparency. I can log into my government website and literally see anything about myself that is known to the government. If you get arrested, your name isn’t released to the press so you can continue your life afterwards. If you go to jail, and apply for a job afterwards, they do a background check. If the job has nothing to do with what you got arrested for, it comes back clean. These are all sensible things. When I grew up in the US, I had absolutely no privacy or expectation of privacy with the digital world. I don’t miss it.

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

#656

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…

> It will take forever to build up a similar ecosystem in Europe And even then it seems risky the EU will deem the business model entirely in violation of privacy laws. It's very chilling When the EU finally completes their utopian/dystopian ideas of privacy from foreign Internet services, the great firewall of Europe, perhaps then EU regulators will look inward and do the same things? But for now it all has the appe…

The point is though that a EU citizen has zero privacy rights when data is transferred to the US. Zero. Not US level protection, not EU level protection - just fair game.

For that simple reason the EU has to step in. There is no other way.

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

#657

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…

> 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. If you've sought the visitors consent then yes it's legal

This court case makes it illegal since, while the user might consent to GA tracking, they legally can't consent to giving up their GDPR rights. Given that, the US law enforcement could still break GDPR by forcing the US corporation to hand over EU citizens' data.

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

#658
post #596

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Or by making getting citizenship something that's attainable in my lifetime. Everyone complains about the US immigration system and of course it's not great but when I came here I kinda knew what the path forward was and how long stuff will take, for a lot of European countries there's no way to ever get citizenship and the path to permanent residency changes every three or four years.

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

#659
post #570

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. Hopefully this is temporary and they can figure out a reasonable compromise. As a Swede I do feel that parts of the EU (with Germany and France) are heading in the wrong direction. Those are not countries famous for their entrepreneurship and it seems like their first instincts in relation to the US are usually protectionist.

I can tell you that there's a deep-seated suspicion in the US that for France, much of GDPR's purpose is about enabling protectionism. The logic is understandable. Surely, if you just get rid of the abusive American monopolies the home-grown companies will take their rightful places... right?

That doesn't seem to be true though. There are multiple countries outside the EU that have an adequacy decisions regarding their privacy laws like: Japan, South Korea, Canada, UK, Isreal, etc. They can host EU data without issues.

The only reason the privacy shield agreement was thrown out was due to lack of safe guards from US intelligence.

Even without the privacy shield, US companies would still be able to store EU data in a country with an adequacy decision if it wasn't for the CLOUD act. This seems more to do with US law wanting access to EU data.

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

#660

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shaking up the current situation doesn't seem to be an entirely bad thing. As it stands, the majority of the internet is depending/residing on datacenters provided by a handful of companies. I'm not sure that's a good thing. Building satisfactory alternatives to Office, Workspaces etc. isn't a monumental task by any stretch. With the sudden demand that you predict, they'll spring up like weeds. This might be ham-fist…

If replacing Office / Workspaces is not a monumental task, why are there only two good options? Workspaces is only just becoming a viable replacement for enterprise because pivot tables are hard.

The big companies buy the little companies as soon as they look like they may be a threat. It’s not monumental or hard to compete with them.
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