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Using Google Analytics without GDPR consent

evrim.io

71–80 of 118 posts

Re: Using Google Analytics without GDPR consent

#73

Honestly, if you’re just a small personal website or blog then just don’t bother with those idiotic cookie consent banners. Use Google Analytics or whatever makes you happy and nobody will ever say anything to you unless you’re an extremely famous person and even then the chances of someone ever bothering you regarding a GA cookie is very unlikely. Especially if you’re a tech blog your readers know how cookies work a…

I agree.

This is one of those laws on the books to punish people who the EU (or relevant national government) think needs to be punished. It's end result is just endless fucking annoyance to use any website and from every one of these threads I read all the annoying cookie permission and opt in popups ar e probably illegal under the GDPR anyway. If I'm going to slap google analytics on a personal site, I'm going to do it and not worry.

For all I know doing that might be forbidden under the GDPR or it might not, I don't care to find out.

Re: Using Google Analytics without GDPR consent

#74
You don't need consent to share personally identifiable data like IP addresses with Google. For GDPR purposes you need a legal basis and "your legitimate interest" is one. You need to honestly assess - ideally write down - your determination of how your need to analyse website performance is balanced against the user's right to privacy. One thing you might consider here is the impact on the user. Then you need to fulfil your duties as a data controller with respect to accuracy, security and so on.

What you do need is consent for cookies (or local storage or similar)· That is required by the ePrivacy Directive (aka cookie law). If you want to persist an identifier on a user's device you need to get consent before you put it there.

GDPR and ePrivacy are related but not the same. You can use GA without cookies (or with only "strictly necessary" cookies which are an exception to the consent rule) and therefore not fall foul of ePrivacy.

Re: Using Google Analytics without GDPR consent

#75
post #5

Another frustrating "web analytics is evil" post, this time trying to not store PII in a service that disallows PII as part of their terms of service.

Worse than that. It’s a “despite my awareness, I’m still ignorant and believe customer data is mine to do with as I see fit.”

Everyone is a potential Zuckerberg or Bezos.

Re: Using Google Analytics without GDPR consent

#76
post #59
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes since GDPR states that personal data is any piece of information that uniquely identifies a living person, creating a unique identifier for each visitor by definition will make you a data processor.

But a unique identifier doesn't necessarily identify a living person, particularly in isolation. It's just that it's frequently associated with a load of additional information that could eventually be used to identify someone (think advertising cookies when associated with a load of browsing data). So you can't escape from scope by saying you're using a unique ID rather than a name. IP addresses are slightly differe…

Suppose the government wants to know what a particular user was reading on your site. They can calculate the hashed ID for that user and then serve a warrant requesting the data for that ID.

Obfuscation of the ID doesn't help.

Re: Using Google Analytics without GDPR consent

#77
post #53
post #13

Not a lawyer myself, but as far as my understanding goes you are identifying your user already by determining his ip, and all the transformations you do to create an id is still reversible with the fixed seeds in your script - so you'll end up sending data to google that makes the user idenfiable nonetheless, so i HIGHLY doubt this is a legitimate way around gpdr. correct me if I'm making wrong assumptions here, as s…

Yes since GDPR states that personal data is any piece of information that uniquely identifies a living person, creating a unique identifier for each visitor by definition will make you a data processor.

So under GDRP are you not allowed to log who visits your site? For say... abuse protection? Assuming you do not share this data with any 3rd party.

Re: Using Google Analytics without GDPR consent

#78
post #11

What is forbidden by GDPR isn't specifically cookie or IP, but but any tracking mechanism which allows to identify an individual uniquely with some amount of certainty, and without prior consent. What he is doing is illegal.

Doesn't that make access log files illegal?

Processing PII doesn't need consent if it's necessary to provide the service. Keeping logs fits in this category: to run a website, you need the ability to debug problems, analyze frauds and attacks. Moreover, you have the responsibility to protect your users, hence be able to analyze attacks, and block malicious IP addresses. And lots of countries have laws that make it mandatory to keep these logs in case police needs them (e.g. France, 1 year mandatory retention).

To make this processing legal, then GDPR demands that you inform your users, minimize the amount of PII, anonymize as soon as possible, and most of all not use this PII for other purposes.

Re: Using Google Analytics without GDPR consent

#80
post #71

Google has an extension on the Chrome Web Store that allows you to opt out of GA tracking. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/google-analytics-o...

GDPR is neither opt-in nor opt-out. The users must consent or no personally identifiable data can be collected/processed.
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