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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

#841

Post by kyletns »

VikingCoder wrote: post #821
__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #706

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Do you think it would be difficult to allow the different HN servers to federate their content across regions?

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

#842

Post by burnoot »

sdoering wrote: post #768
seabrookmx wrote: post #636

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If you’re a data analyst, then of course infra and sysops activities on cloud seem complicated. I’m sure a sysadmin could run/write sql, but would find the rest of your domain complicated too.

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

#843

Post by quocanh »

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #763
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…

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.

For me it's philosophically reminiscent of the Berlin Wall or the Chinese Great Firewall. Personally, my knee-jerk reaction is that it threatens certain freedoms, but I am also a liberal raised with a Western education.

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

#844

Post by verdverm »

withinboredom wrote: post #833
verdverm wrote: post #803

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you are underestimating the effort required to produce an suite of office products. Libre office is a third option, but does it have much usage? Why or why not? Could you sustain a development team capable of creating this with a limited market and revenue stream?

Sorry I wasn’t clear. The reason there are no competing products isn’t because it is hard. It’s because they keep getting bought as soon as someone does “good enough”

They don't have to sell to them though, right?

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

#845

Post by zelphirkalt »

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"?

You are building up a whole strawman here. This is all about sending personal data to a machine in the US, owned by a company, which falls under US law. You don't have to send that personal data to the US, do you? Why would you do such a thing in the first place? Surely informed people would not simply consent to such a practice. And I mean informed. Not just clicking "OK OK next OK" without knowing what actually goes on, just to be able to see the actual content of a website.

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

#846

Post by withinboredom »

verdverm wrote: post #844
withinboredom wrote: post #833

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry I wasn’t clear. The reason there are no competing products isn’t because it is hard. It’s because they keep getting bought as soon as someone does “good enough”

They don't have to sell to them though, right?

Would you turn down a "name your price or we'll run your business into the ground wink wink" (by disabling app store, never getting on the first page to results, etc). Not saying that is what is going on or anything...

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

#847

Post by nomercy400 »

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…

> most successful European entrepreneurs will just end up starting companies in the US instead.

And then they will not be able to serve the european market, nor profit off the european economy. Good luck competing with each other for that US market.

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

#848

Post by VikingCoder »

kyletns wrote: post #841
VikingCoder wrote: post #821

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Do you think it would be difficult to allow the different HN servers to federate their content across regions?

In what way is a French resident protected if their data is stored on a server in France but can be federated to other countries?

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

#849

Post by greenyoda »

tyfon wrote: post #416
judge2020 wrote: post #355

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.

No, EU had an agreement with the US called Privacy shield that allowed US companies to process EU data. However this was struck down by US courts and that is what leaves us with this mess.

> However this was struck down by US courts and that is what leaves us with this mess.

According to Wikipedia, it was struck down by the CJEU, not by a US court:

"The EU-US Privacy Shield for data sharing was struck down by the European Court of Justice on the grounds it did not provide adequate protections to EU citizens on government snooping."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EU%E2%80%93US_Privacy_Shield#L...

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

#850

Post by CamperBob2 »

mping wrote: post #699
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…

This completely misses the point, the laws shouldn't be written to accommodate businesses, its the other way around. If fragmenting is a consequence of better privacy laws, so be it.

If a business pays taxes, and the laws don't take their needs into account to some extent, that's not justice. It's just mob protection with a veneer of legitimacy.

Lots of loaded assumptions there, of course, starting with the first conditional clause.

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