"The CJEU had highlighted the risk that American intelligence services would access personal data transferred to the United States if the transfers were not properly regulated." As an EU citizen: Thank you Mr. Snowden, sir! <3
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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
#722I 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…
I think fragmentation and looking after one's interests aren't even opposites. Analytics in particular seem like a very lopsided value prop: the american entity (Google) stands to gain from collecting analytics but doesn't really provide a perceivable equivalent value through the analytics service to the affected parties (EU consumers) in return, as you'd normally expect in a fair trade policy between two countries.
Looking at it from this angle, it seems perfectly reasonable for the EU to dislike the specifics of the analytics use case while still being ok with something like Google Docs.
Re: Use of Google Analytics declared illegal by French data protection authority
#723Earlier 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…
OVH gave us home. Enrolled us to Startup Program. Gave us support and hefty credit. Managed K8s. Openstack. When we started paying for it, it was still cheaper than AWS. Just because AWS is the default, does not mean you should use it.
When I started, no other providers had the K8s features I needed.
Still prefer Google, as they are the OG for k8s.
Re: Use of Google Analytics declared illegal by French data protection authority
#724Earlier 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.
Well, if you don't even bother to learn the language of the country you want to become a citizen of, then, yes, why stay indeed...
Re: Use of Google Analytics declared illegal by French data protection authority
#725Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it's a valid concern for everyone, yes.
Then you should get out more and talk to some real people.
> Then you should get out more and talk to some real people.
There's a difference between it being a concern for everyone and everyone being concerned by it.
Re: Use of Google Analytics declared illegal by French data protection authority
#726Earlier 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.
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 c…
> 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
I love your wording. Regulation mixed with "operating more freely" is oxymoronic. The same can be said with your argument of "subsidizing a protectionist agenda" when you're referring to the lack of regulation and legislation.
> 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. T
The spat between US tech companies and France's ancient media companies is not new. It's very disingenuous to pretend that the purpose of these laws is just to protect consumers.
Re: Use of Google Analytics declared illegal by French data protection authority
#727Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder who are people more afraid of exposing their private information to: the USA or their own government.
Definitely USA. My government doesn't drone strike people based on communication patterns or disappear them to black sites without ever being put in front of a judge.
I'm sorry, but are we both talking about france here? The "coup d'etat and murder anyone in Africa that goes against my wannabe reboot of a colonial empire," or is it the "bomb Greenpeace ships in foreign countries" France? If we are being honest, the intelligence services of France have proved to be much less accountable and much, much less constrained by pretty much anyone. It's also completely willing to do the bidding of any corporation the French government's "dirigisme" deems worthy enough to assassinate a few Africans for.
The big difference between France and the USA is that the French people usually either passively or actively support them and do not see any problem with what they are doing and would much rather look at the evil Americans. It's not even a political issue, it's almost seen as a divine right.
That's literally one of the main reason macron has been popular: his wannabe bonapartist "great France" mindset (and even those who dislike him don't usually criticize him on that front) that involves crushing the ennemies of France, and a whole lot of illusions of grandeur.
It's also a country where the literal neonazi FN still gets 40% of the votes, but people still laugh about dumb Americans because they voted for trump. Keep in mind, the only reason we don't see more french droning in Africa is because they lack the ability to do so.
And I'm not American or French, but I've had a lot of first hand experience with the damage France is causing in Africa and I'm very familiar with French culture. Yet I'm almost always amazed by the extent of French grandstanding online.
Re: Use of Google Analytics declared illegal by French data protection authority
#728Earlier quoted context omitted.
The cnil.fr page hosting this article seems to use self-hosted piwik, which is a good sign that the regulators think it's ok. (I wonder why they need to collect analytics information for this page at all.)
It's only ok if you self-host on a server in the EU, right? It'll be interesting when different regions of the world start having mutually exclusive laws about where data has to be stored.
>It's only ok if you self-host on a server in the EU, right?
In the EU/EEA or in a jurisdiction that has adequate level of data protection.
Re: Use of Google Analytics declared illegal by French data protection authority
#729I 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…
>It will take forever to build up a similar ecosystem in Europe and I think most successful European entrepreneurs will just end up starting companies in the US instead.
This is what you are wrong about. It would be true if you were from a small country like Sri Lanka or similar but for EU many European companies will smell an opportunity to fill the void.
Re: Use of Google Analytics declared illegal by French data protection authority
#730Earlier quoted context omitted.
Here you go again, being coy. It's not an "also" analytics service. It _is_ an analytics service. If a website poped a question saying "Do you consent to your visit data being passed to Simple Analytics for processing?", how many people would say Yes? Close to zero. Just look at the stats on 3rd party cookie refusals - when done easily, the refusal rates are in high 90%. People may be lazy, but they sure as heck know…
Did you read their docs? They aren’t setting cookies or collecting IP addresses. There’s no question to me that EU authorities would approve this method.
Visitors' IP addresses are provided to Simple Analytics in the course of loading their script and reporting back the results. That's all it took to get web sites using public Google Fonts resources in trouble—note that this didn't involve any actual analytics scripts or overt data collection, just some embedded CSS and font resources.
The only real advantage Simple Analytics has here is that they aren't Google, so they aren't as much of a political target and don't have deep pockets to attract legal predators on the lookout for an oversize payout—which is a pretty thin justification for treating them any differently.