Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Use of Google Analytics declared illegal by French data protection authority

cnil.fr

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

681–690 of 1001 posts

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

#681

Post by withinboredom »

speed_spread wrote: post #219
bo1024 wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or the US could adopt better privacy laws.

Mark one for another American conundrum: having so much distrust for "the man" while at the same time being completely oblivious to the amount of personal data being skimmed off their daily activities. But it's all to guarantee Freedom™ so it must be ok?

Much of the Constitution in the US was written by people who wanted corporations to do whatever they wanted and no government can intervene. You see a lot of this philosophy still living today in rulings and precedent.

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

#683

Post by brianwawok »

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?

The US has plenty of customers. If I had to drop EU, I will. It's a nice bonus, but not a core requirement.

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

#684

Post by voldacar »

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…

No post body was provided.

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

#685

Post by brianwawok »

bcrosby95 wrote: post #679
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…

We colocate about 20 servers and in any given month, spend no more than 1 person-days worth of time dealing with it. Many months we spend no time. That includes both sysadmin and hardware. But this requires knowledge that most devs these days probably don't have. We might spend more time messing around with AWS than our colocated servers.

Right, if you legit need 20 servers than it might make sense for you. I would fit on like 2-3 decent sized servers if I did co-location, and would save not even 1 developer-day of salary...

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

#686

Post by maccolgan »

qualudeheart wrote: post #406
Dave3of5 wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't that cut off a vast swath of the internet from France though ? Some of the main big providers of internet services use US based data centres. I'm meaning: * Amazon * Google * Facebook * Netflix * Microsoft * Twitter * Uber I mean the list goes on but these are a really big part of the internet.

That might be a good thing. New data centers would be constructed in France and the french people would have more jobs. It’d also be a national security boost because France would be less reliant on external data centre providers.

Wow, unironic protectionism and "it'll create jobs" rhetoric.

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

#687

Post by ATsch »

intrasight wrote: post #424

"The IP anonymization feature in Analytics sets the last octet of IPv4 user IP addresses and the last 80 bits of IPv6 addresses to zeros in memory shortly after being sent to Google Analytics. " https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/2763052 I don't understand how this can be construed as tracking users.

This is a totally different question, in this case what matters is that Google can be compelled to release the full IP address by US intelligence agencies.

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

#688

Post by theptip »

themanmaran wrote: post #513
cowl wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

a randomised unique ID and username/password are not personal data if they can't be used to identify a person. IF you associate that uniqueID or username with something that can identify the user (like IP/ Personal name etc) than yes it's illegal for you to store that data in US even with the consent of the user.

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?

The key is consent and right to deletion. GDPR is ok with you storing data if the user consents, you list all the data, you list who you share it with, and you have a contract with anyone you share data with so you can comply with a deletion request.

The US government won’t honor deletion requests for any IPs it requests from GA, therefore you can’t comply with GDPR if you use GA.

If you don’t share data it’s much simpler. You collect just what you need to do the processing the user consented to. And you delete it when a user asks.

Edited to add: I should say the 2nd paragraph seems to be the regulator's position. It seems a bit extreme to me and I don’t fully endorse it. But my main point was to try to highlight why most essential and consented processing is unaffected by this ruling.

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

#689

Post by distances »

jdrc wrote: post #446
i5heu wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s okay. The EU can build it itself when the US player are not able to not send data to their US data centres.

I don't think it can. Maybe they can buy yandex, but i think europe has drained its talent tothe US. And even if they build it, how will they monetize it?

That's just ridiculous. It's a miniscule portion of the total talent that has left to US, and Europe draws many people in constantly as immigration is easier.

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

#690

Post by freeflight »

withinboredom wrote: post #642
toqy wrote: post #608

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The rest of the world could also brain drain the US if it was easier to get into. The US -> EU/UK immigrants that I personally know have had a pretty hard time getting there permanently.

I moved from the US to the NL. Love it but I can’t get dual citizenship and getting permanent residence requires knowing the language well enough to pass a test, so why stay? It’s kind of a bummer because my son speaks native-fluent Dutch now. Next up will probably be Ireland.

> Love it but I can’t get dual citizenship and getting permanent residence requires knowing the language well enough to pass a test, so why stay?

Why did you move there in the first place, raising a kid there, when just learning the language is apparently a hurdle too big to take?

Post reply on HN