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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

#821

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…

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.

Sure, so, let's say that France decides that HN info is PII.

So then Hacker News has to launch servers in France.

And then French HN users are in an island, and only see other French HN users' posts and comments.

And, to be clear, you think that's a good thing?

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

#822

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…

Microsoft has set up a fully independent data center and business in German just because of this:

https://news.microsoft.com/europe/2020/09/30/our-commitment-...

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

#823

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So is it likely the European Commission did this in an attempt to block US companies from offering internet services to the EU (or at least, internet services that handle user info)? It's pretty hard to make a profit or operate in the EU if you literally can't control that entity.

Schrems II (and the Privacy Shield invalidation) has been in response to the aggressive data collection by the US government, and the extra-territorial nature of legislation used to achieve this. The US is able regain access to the EU market by repealing/changing CLOUD act and similar legislation, so I personally don't think this is (primarily) done to block US companies. However I am not the one implementing these r…

It seems pretty hard to think the US will drop the legislation every 3-letter-agency had wished for over the decades before it became law. The only thing I can imagine that actually gets the law changed is if the EU heavily invests in prosecuting these cases, to the point that tons of US companies worry they'll lose access to the EU market (with non-negligible fines to back up the law).

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

#824

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> downloads Track hits on a post-download URL > signups Count signups in your DB with a source from a hidden field on the form > Also, Google Adwords counts conversions for visits for 30 days This stuff is mostly meaningless.

>Track hits on a post-download URL It will be mixed with downloads that come from organic search. >This stuff is mostly meaningless. I disagree.

> It will be mixed with downloads that come from organic search.

Use a different page/form to track the two separately.

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

#825

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…

Microsoft has set up a fully independent data center and business in German just because of this: https://news.microsoft.com/europe/2020/09/30/our-commitment-...

Unfortunately, that didn't exist for us back in 2016, and our product is no longer in development.

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

#826

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you are saying the US intelligence agencies have some unfettered access to all of GA data? Or that it is sent unencrypted and intercepted in transit? It's not the DNS calls or phone companies that are more to worry about?

If US intelligence wants to have access, they will, via their law, as far as I understand. They will require Alphabet to give the data, Alphabet will get it from Google, and that is it. No need to listen or intercept anything. Best thing you can do is not to make use of GA in the first place, so that no such data of visitors of your websites exists in Google infrastructure.

I think your understanding of US intelligence and forcing companies into compliance needs updating.

First, it is exaggerated, which is not surprising in today's media and outrage climate. Second, things have changed since Snowden and the congressional oversight had been rolled out. Third, GA is not that valuable compared to other sources.

Your chief complaining would be better spent about how Google uses the data rather than intelligence agencies.

Also note that Google fights against overly broad intelligence / police requests and publishes data on how many they get and comply with.

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

#827

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, and that means, that showing a huge, not easily dismissable popup basically demanding consent, just to watch a video or read an article, for which no tracking or cookies are necessary technically, is not really asking for consent and should be illegal.

Unless the only way for online services to survive is with these targeted ads. Untargeted ads pay a tiny percentage of what targeted ads do, and I'm unsure things like free video hosting with unlimited bandwidth would last long without them. And though hacker news likes to be extreme and say "good" to things like this, there is an unbelievable amount of freely available information on the internet. If you had to pay…

Well, any company worth their salt has a website these days. Not to show ads, but to be visible out there. They obviously gain from having a website, even without ads. They can pay for that.

For other websites, they can ask their community for support. Then maybe we will learn, that we need to pay for good services, or they disappear. That would be better in my opinion than unconsensually becoming the product as the user of the service, because of companies siphoning off personal data and selling to the highest bidder.

Somewhere along the way, we might also realize, that democracies have an interest in having some kind of good news coverage and information pages online. Countries can pay for that. There can be a general tax for maintenance of websites, which are important for the public. I guess this already exists indirectly, because people pay taxes and that money is used to pay people, who work for cities, states and so on and for paying for servers.

I have been running a server for a year or two. Paying for that myself. I get a wage every month from the job, so I can pay for a server. Theoretically I could run lots of services on that server and still only pay the same amount every month. For dedicated people in IT sector wages are often good and they can afford to run a few things out of their own pocket. My guess is many people would do that. Not every website needs to be "financing itself". It is not always about the money. Some people simply want to make a nice thing and are OK with paying for it.

So there are many ways, in which websites can exist without the incessant ads spam and bloat, that we see today.

Besides all of that, ad business is often make-believe by the big players, giving wrong impression of how much an ad actually helps your business and improper conclusion drawing from statistics by marketing departments, instead of data analysts. Funny ones are things like "conversion rate", which doesn't work for a huge percentage of people visiting the website with standard ad blocking solutions. They are not even aware of all those people, because their frontend JS-based tracker wasn't even loaded. In one of my own projects, I saw a block rate of close to 60%. Granted, the targetted audience was quite technical in nature, so they were more likely to have ad blocking solutions in place. But this can show you how far off you can be by just looking at some analytics stats. How many marketing departments are capable of running a proper A-B-test? How many of them have the necessary statistics background to run any study properly and then draw correct conclusions?

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

#828

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…

Working on a consumer SaaS startup and I strongly disagree. A virtual machine on something like DigitalOcean does not provide any of the nice abstractions that something like a Google Cloud Run (or similar on AWS/Azure) provides. The amount of time a cloud provider can save you administratively is difficult to exaggerate. That is from day 1. Should your startup succeed, and you need to scale, the real savings start t…

I've worked on so many small teams where dealing with AWS/Azure etc was a huge part of their day, for very very simple products.

I still remember arguing about bloating a web app with a 1mb package from AWS so it could use their serverless authentication offering.

Common theme as using those lambda function - sometimes paying quite a lot of them - to serve requests that would be twice as fast on the proverbial $5 linux instance.

So yeah, looking from the sidelines it feels like a huge amount of added complexity for small teams, "just in case" they need to scale. Which given how fast modern hardware is way further off than they think.

(unless they use lambda functions for every API request. in which case they better learn to scale in a hurry)

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

#829

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

So yeah, using HTTP to connect to a server that happened to be in the US... That's the thing that prevented us from selling in France. But thanks for lecturing me that "vendor lock in" was what killed our 6-developer team that was developing hardware, and computer vision, and 3D computer graphics, while developing a health care product under the tons of regulation that comes with that. Your arrogance is just stunning…

your frustration is justified. azure/aws is the entire environment. i dont think you could have implemented the suggested magical suggestion in any relevant or practical way.

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

#830
post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is more nuanced: The problem is not the handing over (happens here too), but the fact EU citizens do not get informed this has happend and have no legal way to challenge this (especially concerning FISA/FISC). They have the opportunity to do so in the EU. Yes, this is what will happen with a setup of 3 entities, b/c FANG will not want to miss EU revenue.

Right but the solution is for there to be a treaty between the US and the EU that allows for this. Putting the burden on every foreign company to duplicate their infrastructure is stupid work to solve a human problem.

We already had two (I don't remember the order, but they were called Privacy Shield and Safe Harbour) and somehow US and US companies "forgot" to upheld their part in any meaningiful way, so there's some mistrust on the whole idea at the moment...
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