Use of Google Analytics declared illegal by French data protection authority • Hacker News Board

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

#691

Post by gigel82 » Thu, Feb 10, 2022, 5:51 PM UTC

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…

I'm pretty sure Microsoft 365 is GDPR-compliant and is storing data in whatever jurisdiction you set it up to.

I know we've had a lot of issues with an European company we bought; we're both using Microsoft 365 but they're set up in France. I don't think the IT folks ever figured out how to merge them (even though we probably pay a shitton to MS for support), so those folks keep using their old domain (but we can share documents and whatnot, so at least that's set up).

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

#692

Post by chaostheory » Thu, Feb 10, 2022, 5:52 PM UTC

foxfluff wrote: post #670

chaostheory wrote: post #632

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 e…

The free market isn't perfect, but it's been historically better than centralized economic planning.

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

#693

Post by richardfey » Thu, Feb 10, 2022, 5:54 PM UTC

VikingCoder wrote: post #667

xdennis wrote: post #581

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bel…

The fragmentation is acceptable since the alternative for non-US citizens is to be treated as "free game"?

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

#694

Post by vasco » Thu, Feb 10, 2022, 5:55 PM UTC

FridayoLeary wrote: post #55

vasco wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're also in trouble if you send the data you collect by other methods without consent, to servers based in the USA for NSA to snoop around on and correlate with all their other data points. Unless your argument is "but how would they know about it", in which case that applies to any other crime.

Instead you must give it to their European equivalents (which looks likely given the current state of affairs).

Yes, and NSA can read all communications anyway. This whole thing is a political issue not a technical one.

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

#695

Post by malermeister » Thu, Feb 10, 2022, 5:56 PM UTC

VikingCoder wrote: post #667

xdennis wrote: post #581

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bel…

The solution to this is to get your government to get its shit together on privacy. This is just a defensive act by the Europeans and to blame it on them is victim blaming.

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

#696

Post by mardifoufs » Thu, Feb 10, 2022, 5:57 PM UTC

fleddr wrote: post #546

keewee7 wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The EU combined is the largest economic region in the world. It's not 2011 anymore. The GDP of the US has surpassed the GDP of the EU.

Is this with or without money printing? I'm teasing. I accept your new data, but I don't think it fundamentally changes my point.

If we don't count money printing, europe would probably be in an even worse shape. Remember that the interest rates in the big Western European countries have been negative for years with still almost no economic growth, and that was pre-covid! Even the FED isn't technically directly buying US bonds from the market like the ECB does to prop up the debt sales of its weaker members. Even the historically low current FED rates, I think are still higher than the peak of most European central banks rates of the past 5 years. Again, all of that did very little to prop up their economy (which usually indicates it's pretty zombified) so they couldn't even start hiking the rates back in 2018-2019 like the FED did. That means they are now stuck with very few "easy" ways to recover from 2020.

I know you are just joking, but the sheer irony of a money printer joke in this context was just too much for me to not react :')

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

#697

Post by munk-a » Thu, Feb 10, 2022, 5:58 PM UTC

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.

I emigrated to Canada pretty much on a whim (using a fiance visa) and have fared quite well there. We (my partner and I) are weighing the possibility of emigrating again to Portugal which offers a rather reasonable golden visa - with a wide variety of European countries offering "trial" visas for workers under 30 with the most bare of requirements.

As a US citizen I've contemplated getting my wife residency down there and it's simply ridiculous - as are the hoops I'd have to go through to relinquish my US citizenship and that only matters because the US feels entitled to own me even though I haven't resided there for nearly a decade at this point. US immigration, from the working visa angle, is extremely unpredictable and only really estimable if you've got a large corporation with a whole bunch of lawyers to get your back - spousal visas aren't terrible but most come with some seriously onerous lifetime costs to execute (like taking a year off working).

I know there are a bunch of European countries and they've all got their quirks to immigrate into but you can really trivially get an EU passport and then move around within the EU.

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

#698

Post by nickpp » Thu, Feb 10, 2022, 5:58 PM UTC

kergonath wrote: post #530

newaccount74 wrote: post #482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The EU is big enough that companies like Microsoft will find a way to offer their services legally, and if they wouldn't, it would be a huge opportunity to EU based competitors. It's not like we don't have any software companies in the EU. Also, there's no reason that collaboration tools must be hosted on a US cloud. Especially Microsoft traditionally provided tools for their customers to host their own infrastructur…

I think you’re right. Microsoft is perfectly able to split its operations. They’re doing it now in China in a much more drastic fashion, and they seem to have been preparing to do it in Europe for a few years now.

The fact that US companies may need to treat Europe like China speaks volumes about the road the EU is headed on.

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

#699

Post by mping » Thu, Feb 10, 2022, 5:59 PM UTC

VikingCoder wrote: post #667

xdennis wrote: post #581

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bel…

This completely misses the point, the laws shouldn't be written to accommodate businesses, its the other way around. If fragmenting is a consequence of better privacy laws, so be it.

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

#700

Post by freeflight » Thu, Feb 10, 2022, 5:59 PM UTC

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.

> No one is forced to use TikTok.

TikTok was nearly forced to sell parts of its operation so it could continue operating in the US, in India it's actually banned.

> DuckDuckGo's success is an example of that.

As good as DDG is, it's not that great of an example as all the background tech there still relies on Microsoft's Bing, which means there is very much a US-centric search engine monopoly in place.

> that will fracture the internet

Maybe the Internet needs fracturing, we've reached a point where a handful of US corporations control the vast majority of the web traffic [0], that kind of massive centralization is the absolute antithesis to what the web is supposed to be and presents a massive filter bubble in-itself.

[0] https://staltz.com/the-web-began-dying-in-2014-heres-how.htm...