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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

#661

Post by autoconfig »

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…

Working on a consumer SaaS startup and I strongly disagree. A virtual machine on something like DigitalOcean does not provide any of the nice abstractions that something like a Google Cloud Run (or similar on AWS/Azure) provides. The amount of time a cloud provider can save you administratively is difficult to exaggerate. That is from day 1. Should your startup succeed, and you need to scale, the real savings start to kick in since scaling to a large degree is handled for you. Good luck re-architecting your app into a kubernetes cluster and handling load balancing manually while your competition gets all that with almost no effort.

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

#662

Post by [deleted] »

brianwawok wrote: post #599
wongarsu wrote: post #534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

[deleted]

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

#663

Post by knorker »

leobg wrote: 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.

Oh? I missed this. What regulation is that?

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

#664

Post by seiferteric »

RIMR wrote: post #617
seiferteric wrote: post #593

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...

I don't think these concepts are comparable. My First Amendment rights cannot be violated by a private website, because I can always go to another website, or start my own. Being deplatformed isn't the same as being silenced, because nobody is preventing you from speaking, or punishing you legally for what you have said. My Fourth Amendment rights could absolutely be violated by a private website, as they could hand…

Hmm, but you could have not given the data or used the website in the first place.

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

#665

Post by maccolgan »

pvarangot wrote: post #658
crehn wrote: post #596

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why are you importing New World thinking to the Old World?

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

#666

Post by gwright »

crehn wrote: post #596
Mountain_Skies wrote: post #535

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.

> It’d help if the rest of the world tried to aggressively prevent brain drain

What does that mean? Are you suggesting that countries should control where their citizens choose to work/live?

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

#667

Post by VikingCoder »

xdennis wrote: post #581
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 priv…

You are absolutely fragmenting the internet.

We had PII on Azure. We wanted to do business in France. We had to fork our services, and run a full stack on a crappy provider in France. They charged a lot more, would take weeks of vacation with zero support for us. It was a freaking nightmare.

EDIT: I love the responses I'm getting. People are in absolute denial that this does in fact fragment the internet. You may believe that's a good thing, and that's a rational discussion we can have. But don't lie to yourself, or to me, that this doesn't fragment the internet.

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

#668

Post by rendall »

pvarangot wrote: post #658
crehn wrote: post #596

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In what European country specifically is there no way to ever get citizenship?

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

#669

Post by geoduck14 »

belorn wrote: post #643
brianwawok wrote: post #599

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I would guess that if costs is an issue then it must also be balanced compared to the potential profits. If your current $200 solution only allowed you to have US customers, while a $300 solution would allow you to have both US and EU customers, which one would you choose?

>I would guess that if costs is an issue then it must also be balanced compared to the potential profits. If your current $200 solution only allowed you to have US customers, while a $300 solution would allow you to have both US and EU customers, which one would you choose?

Whichever one let me pay rent at the end of the month

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

#670

Post by foxfluff »

chaostheory wrote: post #632
foxfluff wrote: post #624

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you flip the scenario around in your mind.. how would you feel if virtually every site or service you visit scoops up your data and sends it to [China|Russia|...] and hosts all your private data on servers operated by the [Chinese|Russians|...] and are subject to [Chinese|Russian|...] rule and disregard whatever laws your country has enacted? How would you feel if you couldn't opt out without virtually opting out…

Simple. If you have a free market, I would just use competing services instead of the "Chinese" ones. No one is forced to use TikTok. If people really wanted a privacy focused service, a new one will arrive. DuckDuckGo's success is an example of that. imo it's just a thinly veiled protectionist law that will fracture the internet all for the sake of propping up EU incumbents who can't innovate.

Yes it's simple in dreams and an economic theory stuck in an era where a potato is a potato and it doesn't matter much whose potato you buy. Unfortunately the free market tends to be a race to the bottom, for complicated reasons. The market is also not effective nor is it rational, nor is it good at displacing entrenched players and natural monopolies, least of all ones that don't give a crap about ethics. It's not effective against deliberate lock-in and network effects, nor against externalities and exploitation. It's not effective where effect requires individual sacrifice multiplied by millions.

If free market were effective, we wouldn't have needed labour laws to keep people from dying in factories where they work 16 hours a day, we wouldn't need laws to make vehicles safe, we wouldn't be desperately looking for agreements to curb pollution and climate change, we wouldn't need laws to protect minorities against discrimination.. hell, I don't think we'd need laws at all because everyone would just rationally and effectively choose good actors & displace bad actors.

It's a nice fantasy, but it's not one we live in.

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