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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

#791

Post by karmelapple »

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…

Quick question: was there a reason you could not use Azure’s region support? https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/global-infrastructure/geog...

Or was it before Azure had that? Looks like they’ve had it for awhile, at least back to 2009 or 2010.

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

#792

Post by dntrkv »

RustyConsul wrote: post #647
mmastrac wrote: post #609

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Protecting the privacy of citizens is not akin to society-wide censorship, a la China. This is a disingenuous argument.

Kind of. I'm still losing my ability to choose. I've often found the slippery slope 'Fallacy' to not be so much of a fallacy in reality when it comes to power.

“Slippery Slope” is only a fallacy when you can’t reasonably draw a line from the proposed idea to the “dangerous” end result.

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

#793

Post by titzer »

VikingCoder wrote: post #786
titzer wrote: post #777

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You are absolutely fragmenting the internet. It's not fragmenting the internet; fragmentation is the whole point of the internet. It's (re-)decentralizing something that has been decentralized the whole time, until these gluttonous whales decided try to eat the whole pie.

So a computer in France can not legally talk to a computer in the United States, but if I instead put that computer in France, I'm legally okay. And you're convinced that embodies "the whole point of the internet"?

It isn't about "one computer talking to another", it's about where sensitive information is stored. It has never been legal to store classified US intelligence on computers outside of the control of the US government. That's an extreme example, but the handling of many types of information is prescribed by laws in different jurisdictions. Does that mean that US computers cannot "talk" to another other computers? No. Does that make the internet invalid? No.

Decentralization of the cloud is a good thing for so many reasons. I think you're deliberately confusing it with your PII issues and not grasping the larger picture.

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

#794

Post by unknown2374 »

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…

You do realize by the same logic this inspires competitors to innovate...

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

#795

Post by nickpp »

sweetbitter wrote: post #774
nickpp wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eating tainted meat can kill you. What’s the worst corporations can do by tracking you? Better ads?!

"We kill people based on metadata." - Former NSA Head Michael Hayden.

Last I heard, the NSA was a governmental agency, not a corporation.

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

#796

Post by VikingCoder »

titzer wrote: post #793
VikingCoder wrote: post #786

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So a computer in France can not legally talk to a computer in the United States, but if I instead put that computer in France, I'm legally okay. And you're convinced that embodies "the whole point of the internet"?

It isn't about "one computer talking to another", it's about where sensitive information is stored. It has never been legal to store classified US intelligence on computers outside of the control of the US government. That's an extreme example, but the handling of many types of information is prescribed by laws in different jurisdictions. Does that mean that US computers cannot "talk" to another other computers? No.…

I think you're ignoring the harm done to small businesses who cannot afford to implement decentralized services.

You are raising the barrier to entry, limiting competition.

Competition is good for so many reasons. I think you're deliberately ignoring the impact on small companies and not grasping the larger picture.

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

#797

Post by quicksilver03 »

martin_a wrote: post #494
quicksilver03 wrote: post #485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IP addresses are PII when they can identify a person, and that's not always the case, e.g. a company network using NAT for outgoing connections so that dozens, if not hundreds of people appear from the same IP address.

How are you supposed/able to make that decision on a log level?

There's no way you can make that decision, which is why the simplest course of action, or the less risky one, is to treat any IP address as it actually conveyed PII, even 192.168.0.1.

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

#798

Post by quocanh »

javajosh wrote: post #772
VikingCoder wrote: post #756

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>I'm sorry, do you have any idea of the cost of doing these things? Oh indeed yes, which is why for years now I've been warning people to not write to proprietary APIs in the first place. It's a faustian bargain and sooner or later the bill is going to come due! If not because of legal requirements, then because MS or Amazon saturates the market, and has to increase revenue somehow . This is an example of where an ou…

"Don't make HTTP calls outside of our borders."

"We're not fragmenting the internet."

???

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

#799

Post by drdaeman »

brianwawok wrote: post #599
wongarsu wrote: post #534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> like AWS, Azure, Mailchimp, PayPal etc [...] No cloud services, no Office 365 or Google Workspace. Maybe an unpopular opinion, but imho AWS, GCP and Azure are popular with startups because of their generous free credits, not because they are good tools for startups. 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, Grids…

> 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…

> never had to deal with any Linux Server admin BS.

Oh, you just had to deal with a different flavor of BS. Or you was lucky and everything just worked out for you (but why Google Cloud and not some PaaS like Heroku, so you don't have to deal with cloud infrastructure/servers BS altogether?)

I've been both a system administrator, managing GNU/Linux and FreeBSD servers in the ancient ages, and DevOps guy doing all sort of stuff in the clouds. The complexity is still there, it hadn't disappeared in some magic cloud pixie dust, even though sales would wanna tell you that fairy tale. But here's the thing - you never get to dive into those waters (or hire someone to do it for you, be it an employee, contractor or paid support) unless shit hits the fan and forces you to.

You must've cheerfully walked through a minefield and haven't stepped on and even seen any mines. Honestly, I'm happy it worked that way. And hopefully, this minefield is sparse enough those days so you're a rule not an exception - I don't have meaningful statistics. It would be actually interesting to run a poll or something. I just happen to have seen a few companies/people for whom clouds weren't all unicorns and rainbows.

And as for the flavors - it just happened that you knew how to set up stuff in Google Cloud. Would you happened to know how to spin a simple instance on Digital Ocean instead and went that way, and be lucky to not encounter any serious issues, it would've been the same painless experience, just different flavor.

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

#800

Post by Moru »

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…

An alternative is to push USA to get similar laws making it equal on both sides.
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