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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

#871

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

France, Year Opened 2018, is what I see on that page. This was impacting us in 2014 to 2016, as I remember.

However all the GDPR requirements entered into force just in may 2018?

But in any case, the point is that the issue is solved without changing the laws or people having to switch cloud providers, as simply the global cloud providers have started offering compliant services.

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

#872

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…

> On the contrary, it only forces those providers to have a European presence.

It’s interesting to see the pattern here: if you can’t innovate, regulate.

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

#873
post #699

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.

Laws should be written to facilitate and improve the growth of civilization. This includes practical and fair measures for conducting business.

Imposing byzantine regulations on every webmaster on the planet isn't helping anyone, least of all the European user, who will increasingly be locked out from the rest of the planet.

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

#874

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we fragment and destroy the entire Internet I would call fragmenting these things rebuilding the internet. Not sure how consolidating everyone on a few Mailchimp type services is in anyone's interest.

Exactly. If this make European startups build their own ecosystem and provides me with an alternative for the services I use but don't track me, I'm going to switch - simple as. I see this as a win for the internet.

Unfortunately, you will find that they'll "track" you just the same, but provide worse service due to smaller economies of scale.

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

#875

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…

> 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…

> 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.

That’s a complete misunderstanding of the cloud’s value proposition. The point of the cloud is to have things “just work” so you can spend more time shipping features and innovating. When I see startups not using it and “rolling their own cloud” by being their own sysadmin I question the strategic decision. To me it’s generally a sign that they failed to raise the appropriate amount of capital and are therefore trading velocity and agility for cost savings.

> So I'm not really sure what part of the ecosystem we are missing here? European companies often have the smaller advertising budget and mindshare, but it isn't like they don't exist.

Also because they can’t scale within a mostly unified 300 million market like US companies can, they have to special case and deal with all special snowflake regulations in every small European country they want to serve.

Plus, that’s not even touching on the engineering talent gap.

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

#876

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>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.

This does not scale. At some point, you need to make money somewhere.

>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.

>How many marketing departments are capable of running a proper A-B-test?

Again your just digging deeper, further calling out a trillion dollar business for being wrong. Besides that you would likely need thousands of sources to accurately back up such a claim (since there's people paid much more than you, with access to many more resources than you have, have decided this is worth it). You are literally calling out entire departments that likely have a payroll 1000x your salary.

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

#877

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…

Tangential, but assuming you're talking about Listing Mirror? I considered working on a similar product a few years ago, but felt the market was too competitive. Interesting you were able to compete with the plethora of similar services.

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

#878

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?

To be clear, you are underestimating the population size of European countries, as if would be a drama to lose HN or simply fork it. I love hackernews, but there’s way more world out there to discover. This is protecting EU citizens from EEUU companies having a free lunch on their data.

At last someone admits it outright - you want the EU to be an island, walled off from the rest of civilization, and perhaps also reality

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

#879

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel that the whole point of this is to mimic China’s achievement of driving out foreign competition through legislation. It’s similar to the UK’s pornography laws being more about surveillance and censorship rather than protecting children.

If you flip the scenario around in your mind.. how would you feel if virtually every site or service you visit scoops up your data and sends it to [China|Russia|...] and hosts all your private data on servers operated by the [Chinese|Russians|...] and are subject to [Chinese|Russian|...] rule and disregard whatever laws your country has enacted? How would you feel if you couldn't opt out without virtually opting out…

"they follow US laws"

...when convenient.

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

#880
post #736
post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've read most of the EU rulings and court cases on this topic. The CLOUD Act is basically the only US law that any of them mention or refer to. And let's be explicit here: The entire purpose of the CLOUD Act is to bypass EU data protection laws. The incident that led to the creation of this law is that Microsoft didn't hand data over to the FBI because the data was on a server in Ireland. This isn't an unintended co…

The point of the CLOUD Act was to say that if you are a company in the US you can't ignore an order to turn over a copy of data you control just because you happen to have stored that data with a third party storage provider that is not in the US. It doesn't matter that the third party storage provider is not under US jurisdiction because the US government isn't trying to compel the third party storage provider to do…

There's a critical nuance that you're ignoring, which is whose data is being stored. In the incident in question, it wasn't Microsoft's data. It was the data of a customer of Microsoft. You're treating several different scenarios as "data controlled by Microsoft," but there are sharp distinctions between Microsoft's own HR records, vs an email belonging to one of Microsoft's customers.

US law doesn't distinguish these scenarios very much because of the Third Party Doctrine, where data given to a third party has no expectation of privacy. But this is a view rather particular to the US not shared by much of the rest of the world, and certainly not by GDPR (or its predecessors). One way or another, the CLOUD Act is still basically saying that US legal doctrine applies to data stored in other jurisdictions. And GDPR is stating, correctly, that this doctrine is not compatible with EU data privacy obligations. EU policy is very much the opposite of the Third Party Doctrine (and the winds are slowly turning against it in the US as well), and third-party data controllers have positive obligations to safeguard the privacy of data given to them.

Given this scenario, I don't see the nightmare scenario you're posing actually manifesting. EU data protection laws do nothing to curtail Microsoft handing over Microsoft's data. There's just data that Microsoft physically stores which they is not legally theirs.

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