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Use of Google Analytics declared illegal by French data protection authority

cnil.fr

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

#761

Post by gigatexal »

javajosh wrote: post #744
VikingCoder wrote: post #667

Earlier 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…

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…

The small startup I worked for in Hamburg had a similar problem. They had to run all their infra on premise due to some wording of some of their largest clients and some odd rulings from BaFin.

The colo/managed provider they chose and had been working with for years was nigh incompetent. I was positive that being able to spin up infra in any of the clouds would have been a ton more reliable.

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

#762

Post by cpeterso »

VikingCoder wrote: post #756
javajosh wrote: post #744

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

We did our research, and settled on the French cloud provider that fit our parameters. They made promises about support hours that they did not keep. Changing cloud service providers is not cheap. We were a small team, and this cost us lots of effort. We didn't fork our code, we forked our services. We ran everything on Azure. Then we had to configure our kiosk devices to either talk to Azure, or to talk to our serve…

Do cloud service providers like Azure not have a way to "pin" some of your service instances to servers in specific countries? Seems like this capability would be important differentiating feature given EU privacy laws about where user data is hosted.

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

#763

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

xdennis wrote: post #581
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…

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…

Perhaps it's a fragmented internet that is best aligned with our own interests.

I, for one, would really like to have more fragments to explore.

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

#765

Post by greenyoda »

mekkkkkk wrote: post #545
verdverm wrote: post #516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If replacing Office / Workspaces is not a monumental task, why are there only two good options? Workspaces is only just becoming a viable replacement for enterprise because pivot tables are hard.

A big reason is that competing with them on equal footing is a monumental task. You are working against network effects, heavy duty marketing, integrations into other products and a whole army of developers. Developing the product itself isn't the reason.

But network effects and marketing are irrelevant for products that can't be used in your country because they violate local laws. If some Google product can't legally be used in the EU, then it has zero network effects there and Google wouldn't waste money marketing it there.

Also, the competing EU-based service might be strong competitors to the ones in the U.S., among people like me who are privacy conscious. I don't use Google services, but I'd be happy to consider using GDPR-compliant services based in Europe.

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

#766

Post by p4bl0 »

Y-bar wrote: post #82
p4bl0 wrote: post #72

Sadly I don't see how this decision can be translated into practice, since I strongly doubt the CNIL will be able (or willing) to send formal notice, and fine after a grace period, all French companies that make use of Google Analytics on their website.

Why is the onus on the CNIL to notify companies on the law (which they actually did by issuing this press release) and not on companies to keep up-to-date with the law (which they could to by reading the news)?

This is just how it works. I'm not making the rules. The CNIL send "mise en demeure" to companies that do not complies with the GDPR and even before that with the "loi informatique et libertés" and if the companies ignore the "mise en demeure" after some time the CNIL can fine them.

It also happens that the CNIL is notoriously more and more lenient on a lot of things.

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

#767

Post by gigatexal »

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…

Or... Or... these co's stop mining/saving data on all EU folks altogether. If they could prove to regulators that the tracking and mining and selling of data does not happen at all for EU folks perhaps these cloud players could still sell services to the EU market.

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

#768

Post by sdoering »

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…

Disclaimer: Anecdata

Privately I host nearly everything on a shared host in Germany (that is everything I can host without sudo) [1].

For company policy reasons I must absolutely use AWS or GCE.

For an internal project I need to setup Matomo. Something I did thrice in the last few month on [1].

OK login through SSO into AWS. Look around, ask Google, find the bitnami image, click few buttons. Done. OH shit. Now I need to somehow make it publicly available. OK. Google again. Ah this is the way. Few hours of reading and clicking later I have a publicly reachable Matomo instance. Oh hey. It warms me that it is not ssl encrypted. OK. How to do let's encrypt? Google again with my second batch of coffee (or was it the third). Found an easy way, just enter a command in the shell. Oh hey, how do I get my ssh pub key into my EC2 instance?

Damn the day is nearly gone and I have yet to deliver this tangential asset to an internal project while killing my CCI (how much I am booked on client work) for something that the first time took me 30 minutes with the great documentation from [1].

To me as a meager Data Analyst the complexity of cloud offerings is a nightmare. And the documentation is written for other echelons of tech understanding most of the time.

[1] uberspace.de

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

#769

Post by j4yav »

withinboredom wrote: post #642
toqy wrote: post #608

Earlier 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.

The language test is incredibly easy, for what it’s worth. It is nowhere near fluent, or really even conversationally competent. It’s things like saying the correct words when buying an apple at a store.

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

#770

Post by p4bl0 »

Vosporos wrote: post #176
p4bl0 wrote: post #72

Sadly I don't see how this decision can be translated into practice, since I strongly doubt the CNIL will be able (or willing) to send formal notice, and fine after a grace period, all French companies that make use of Google Analytics on their website.

nul n'est censé ignorer la loi.

Yes and of course because of that everyone is respecting the law, especially companies when they're not at any risk if they don't. /s

Yes I'm a bit pessimistic about this. Let's all hope I'm wrong.

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