What if, say I’m using Microsoft to backend my user authentication and it’s keeping a record of ip/user here in the USA?
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
#742No post body was provided.
Re: Use of Google Analytics declared illegal by French data protection authority
#743Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Just that two ships are departing from a location does not mean they heading in the same direction.
It is true that both the EU and China are swiftly heading away from this unprecedented era of technology companies being able to act as they please abroad without impunity. It is an era that the US, which benefits from this arrangement greatly, understandably does not want to leave.
But what matters is why they are doing this, not that they are doing it. And in that regard it is much harder to find similarities.
Re: Use of Google Analytics declared illegal by French data protection authority
#744Earlier 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…
There is so much I want to say about this comment! First of all, it sounds like you had a terrible experience because you picked a bad ISP. I sympathize. But then you generalize from that and imply that anyone wanting an EU host will experience the same. Obviously that's not true - or do you believe no good ISPs exist in France? Second of all, why did you fork your code? Did you write your service to use proprietary Azure APIs without regard to vendor lock-in? Why not take this as an opportunity to incrementally extract the proprietary apis out of your application and replace them with processes you actually own? This will allow you to undo the fork and continue on, able to deploy your application anywhere you want.
Re: Use of Google Analytics declared illegal by French data protection authority
#745Random thought, maybe totally off base. This is Europe, so not equivalent but there seems to be a lot of people in the US as well who want private companies to be compelled to respect your privacy (4th amendment) but also many people who don't think websites should or could be compelled to respect your freedom of speech (1st amendment), I wonder if there is an overlap in these groups...
My (European) perspective is that, just like we need laws to protect privacy online, we do also need laws to institute freedom of speech online.
I'm not exactly sure what the right way to go about it is (obviously we shouldn't and cannot force every company online to publish whatever anyone wants to say), but fact is that right now you are at the mercy of private companies if you want to communicate online, and restricting freedom of speech to the proverbial "free speech zone" where discussion isn't actually happening is not a healthy state of affairs.
I'd probably at least advocate for something like net neutrality.. ISPs and hosting providers should not work as censors and arbiters of good taste. They should be more like utilities; as long as you're not doing anything illegal, what you do or say is none of their business. Unfortunately this isn't a solution for the common person whose communications are limited to platforms like facebook and twitter.
Re: Use of Google Analytics declared illegal by French data protection authority
#746Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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Re: Use of Google Analytics declared illegal by French data protection authority
#747This was the only sane decision they could come to. Google's evil practices are death to any free society and a threat to the national security of any country but the U.S. where the deep-state pimps are busy siphoning Google's data to use against its own citizens. Here in the US we live in what only appears to be a free country where sociopaths, pimps and whores rise to the top and are protected by the DOJ, DHS and the whole alphabet soup of criminal organizations that protect the wealthy and the powerful. The transformation of the country from 1970 to 2022 is stark. We are headed to a dystopia led by the whores at Google.
Re: Use of Google Analytics declared illegal by French data protection authority
#748If someone adds http://blah.us "> to their website, and that image is hosted in the United States, how does that not also violate French data protection? The user's browser makes a request to a US server, including the user's IP address. I legit do not understand how to make French people happy with these laws.
I've been having to remove google fonts because we had some germans say we're breaking their laws by using them
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Re: Use of Google Analytics declared illegal by French data protection authority
#749Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you want to toss some static HTML into a host, go for it. If you want to record statistics on how many page hits you had, go for it. If you want to add JavaScript for interactions and making it look prettier, go for it. But if you want to contribute to a privacy-violating network that tracks individual users, then that goes far beyond wanting "just to put up a website somewhere".
At this point, tossing some static text up with default apache configs runs afoul of GDPR opt-out and data-scrubbing requirements, IIUC.
I'd be interested to hear exactly what default configuration violates GDPR, as that wasn't something I'd heard before. However, even if that is the case, that would imply that the defaults should be changed.
Imagine that you run a workplace where floor space is relatively expensive. To avoid increasing the floor space, you determine exactly how wide each hallway must be, exactly how much space is required, and build everything to that specification. Your hiring decisions take the weight of an applicant into account, so that nobody will be too large for those hallways. Then a law comes along saying that your coal mine is dangerous, and your use of child labor is unethical. "But look at the cost!", you cry, "I can't afford to enlarge every tunnel to accommodate full-grown adults!" But there was no reason the tunnels couldn't have been built larger in the first place.
There was no reason why the web and the internet could not have chosen to respect privacy by default, and thereby avoid the current costs of changing their software and business models. If it is true that the default apache configurations violate privacy standards, just as any configuration of Google Analytics violates privacy standards, then that is a sign of just how much the regulation is needed.
Re: Use of Google Analytics declared illegal by French data protection authority
#750I 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…
the EU is shrinking in importance in terms of the world economy [1]
another 20 years and companies simply won't bother with it at all
[1]: https://fullfact.org/europe/eu-less-important-world-economy/