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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

#701

Post by [deleted] »

seabrookmx wrote: post #636
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…

100%. The hidden part here is "DigitalOcean-level of complexity" is actually "DigitalOcean-level of features." The big cloud providers have a variety of offerings of different complexity. Using GCP as an example: want k8s with all it's flexibility and complexity? You have GKE. Want to still run containers, but abstract away all the cluster resource management? CloudRun. Abstract away the container itself? CloudFuncti…

[deleted]

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

#702

Post by rightbyte »

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…

> would take weeks of vacation with zero support for us

Heh. Somethings tells me a devops engineer in France has way better work-life balance.

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

#703

Post by scraptor »

tempnow987 wrote: post #637
dbrgn wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. From what I can tell: If you ask your users for permisssion ("informed consent"), then no, it is not illegal. The way I understood the court case in Austria, the disputed point was whether or not the use of GA f…

I think this is basically a fat EU lie - that if you pop up a cookie popup most users say no to cookie banners. I've heard that if you do a non-modal cookie banner, 75% of people just ignore it rather than go into it to deny cookies. About 12% (half of remaining) click accept all cookies. The rest close it again without taking action if they can. I realize there are folks who go into things and customize everything o…

My hypothetical ISP and TV would also be violating GDPR if they did such things. They might currently face fewer lawsuits than google but that doesn't mean that no one cares.

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

#704

Post by openplatypus »

TomGullen wrote: post #560
openplatypus wrote: post #382

Luckily there is plenty to choose from. We entered the market recently with Wide Angle Analytics https://wideangle.co . But there is plenty alternatives. Depending on your needs. Some focus on visuals, we focus on filters and soon attribution. There is more on the list: https://european-alternatives.eu/category/web-analytics-serv... Competition is a healthy thing. You DON'T HAVE TO use Google Analytics :) And if you…

So what primary key does WideAngle use to track users across sessions? It mentions anonymised IP? Isn't that what Google do? You mention you store anonymised IP's "Unlike some other vendors, our anonymization process is not reversible.", what is the methodology here?

Randomized, daily rotated un-guessable component is added to every hash. There is whole bucket of these such that across single day, per group of users there is small overlap. These are transient, strictly never logged. After 24h there is no way for us to reverse the IP. To reverse the IP we would need this transient value (long gone by that point), the EXACT user agent and the IP itself.

We mentioned "Unlike some other vendors" because we noticed that not everyone is (or was, at the time of our research) adding a random component. Without that component, salt if you like, you cannot guess the IP, but knowing the user IP and agent, you could find their historical traffic, hence attribute the traffic to an individual.

Our solution can't do it.

This practice has been used and documented in software engineering for now.

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

#705

Post by M2Ys4U »

keewee7 wrote: post #487
fleddr wrote: post #471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah, the tools will be adjusted to comply. The EU combined is the largest economic region in the world. With backdrop the other huge one China where doing business has become increasingly difficult and volatile. Tech giants cannot afford to pull out of the EU. Call their bluff, they won't. They can't even if they wanted to, as shareholders will skin them alive.

>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.

Being the number 2 (or three if China overtakes) is still not exactly a weak position to be in...

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

#706

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

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 internet was designed to be resilient in the face of nuclear war. If it can't handle governments that actually protect their citizens from predation by multinational corporations, then we should rethink some things about the direction that we've taken with it.

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

#707

Post by MikusR »

ElKrist wrote: post #572
MikusR wrote: post #486

That means that Firefox is also illegal in France.

"That means that Firefox is also illegal in France." I'll be the one: can you please expand on your statement?

Addon page in settings has built in Google analytics.

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

#708

Post by munk-a »

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.

As a counter point - I think it's fair to view the extreme lack of consumer protection laws in the US as protectionism for domestic tech companies. The US has been extremely resistant to roll out consumer protection laws and that's shifted it into being the equivalent of a pacific island nation with extremely lax tax laws - it's the wild west of the internet where all the sane laws don't exist that attracts all the companies that don't want to play by the rules.

The US could coordinate and work with the EU to try and craft laws that span both regions in a unified manner so that businesses can operate more freely but instead they're choosing to subsidize a protectionist agenda by levying a cost on the privacy information of its residents.

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

#709

Post by tshaddox »

toqy wrote: post #568
tshaddox wrote: post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s bad too. There are also things happening in the world that are much worse, like people getting murdered. All these things can be bad at the same time.

> That’s bad too In what way? I agree that personally tracking an individual and using psychology tricks and whatnot to trick them into buying stuff is bad, but if it's just a company knowing what works well for them, I don't see the argument.

I was referring to this:

> when you go shopping and pay with cash in a store with no surveillance, your shopping habits are being shared against your wishes with a random third party

Retail stores also use your shopping data to target you with ads. Credit cards also obviously sell your purchase data to anyone willing to pay for it. I wouldn't be surprised if retail stores even sell your cash purchase data to any third party willing to pay for it.

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

#710

Post by rebelde »

PoignardAzur wrote: post #435
rebelde wrote: post #210

Taking this to the logical extreme: A French website can not use any American service, right? Because any American services "are not sufficient to exclude the accessibility of this data for US intelligence services".

We're quickly getting there. For instance, any service that handles health data absolutely cannot have the data be accessible in a way, shape or form by american-owned entities, for any reason. It's not hard to imagine that, as time goes on, these same limitations will be expanded to other types of decreasingly sensitive data. And honestly, that's perfectly reasonable. The US government gives itself the right to syst…

What about Hungarian services? Hungary is in the EU.
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