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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

#971

Post by raxxorrax »

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…

I don't think Google analytics is that essential. It has privacy problems and there are alternatives around. It is just often the lazy choice of developers. They would have to adjust a bit, comes with the job anyway. Not using it doesn't "fragment the internet".

I still don't think laws against specific software is helpful though.

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

#972

Post by YetAnotherNick »

i5heu wrote: post #957
YetAnotherNick wrote: post #619

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would EU building it themselves going to happen? Either it could be profitable for company to operate in EU or it is not. Assuming current US companies are efficient enough and if they couldn't be profitable, why could be a same thing built by EU is profitable there. In fact it is opposite as they couldn't track as much as American companies even outside EU.

Because the US companies are bloat with their bureaucracy and structures. A Google is not able to pull a startup thing. See Stadia or the other short-lived projects, they all suffer from a lack of skin in the game - so to say.

There are more startups in US than EU. Also I think bureaucracy is worse in EU than in US.

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

#973

Post by lucideer »

drusepth wrote: post #942
lucideer wrote: post #456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> how does that not also violate French data protection? The regulations don't ban collecting IPs (nor any PII). They just regulate it to the point that it must be deemed necessary according to certain criteria. I would imagine linking an image may be fine in 95% of cases, but what it would mainly depend on is the logging practices of the image hosting company. Their business would be bound by EU regulation if they a…

>Their business would be bound by EU regulation if they are choosing to sell service to an EU-based website, and it's likely that image host that would be liable for compliance. Is the image hosting company really _choosing_ to sell service to an EU-based website if someone adds http://blah.us "> to their (French) website? It seems like it'd be an unreasonable expectation upon a company (especially one in a completel…

This largely depends on whether the French website is a paying customer hosting their own images in a deliberate fashion (e.g. Amazon being responsible for facilitating GDPR compliance of S3 logs), or if it's a randomly hotlinked non-owned image.

In the latter (hotlinking) case the French website would almost certainly be entirely responsible if they operate at scale (excepting user generated content). In the former, it's obviously less clear cut (and also as mentioned revenue & scale are going to be very relevant).

Practical example: a private individual posts a hotlinked image on a French forum. Relevant questions:

- is that user profiting at large scale from data logged on the image server? No.

- is the forum website owner? No.

- is the image host deriving revenue directly from proactively collecting, analysing and profiling user data from readers of that forum post who are based in the EU? Possibly.

- is the image host doing so at large scale? Maybe.

3 & 4 are definitely true of Google Analytics, but broadly won't be true of many image hosts, so your image linking example won't be an issue most of the time.

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

#974

Post by d1sxeyes »

can16358p wrote: post #8

I don't like Google but seriously this whole GDPR thing is getting out of hand. Anyone who's concerned about their data being collected can just block Google-or-like-related domains. Rest is just making life of web developers/admins/tech company owners harder. Especially with these European intentions I frankly believe this is more of a political war against US and US-based companies. (No, I'm not from US as well)

Due to a misconfiguration by my local ISP which meant Google services were not accessible, I discovered that the UK government's 'parliamentlive.tv' has a dependency on JQuery loaded from Google's CDN.

You might say that it's up to the UK government to fix that, and I agree, but as an individual with no direct influence on the implementation of this service, it's also clearly not the case currently that:

> Anyone who's concerned about their data being collected can just block Google-or-like-related domains

Or at least, they can, but they may be excluded from civic services they are entitled to avail themselves of, which their taxes go towards paying for.

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

#975

Post by belorn »

VikingCoder wrote: post #944
belorn wrote: post #941

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its very interesting if limiting how companies are allowed to track, store and sell private information would be the central issue for which the internet will fragment around. It almost like tracking, storing and selling is the center of the modern Internet, rather than protocols like tcp, upd, https and so on. In the past people said that the Internet was made for porn. Today the Internet is seemingly made for adver…

The internet is a tool. You should support companies with the best behavior. I worked at a company that enabled a radiologist in over country to do a preliminary read of a CT scan performed in another country. Cutting the amount of time for a CT scan, and even connecting a CT scan with a radiologist who specialized in that particular kind of scan, we saved lives. And yes, there's also furry porn. It's a tool. I feel…

Could that company exist if it wasn't allow to use advertisement or sell private information? In the past I would say yes without question since there is nothing inherently in connecting a CT scan with a radiologist specialist that require Google Analytics. Nothing at all.

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

#976

Post by ceejayoz »

can16358p wrote: post #966
ceejayoz wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's like blaming the people in Flint, Michigan for drinking the lead-tainted water.

You need to drink water to survive. You browse web voluntarily, picking the website you want to visit voluntarily and with intention to go there. No one dies if they don't visit a website.

Yeah, no.

My kids cannot opt out of Microsoft Teams - it’s a school requirement. People applying for jobs are gonna have to apply online these days.

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

#977

Post by iggldiggl »

iso1210 wrote: post #804
knorker wrote: post #663

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh? I missed this. What regulation is that?

There isn't one There's a German law which says all commercial webpages have to say who runs it.

1. The legal definition of what's "commercial" under that law and what's not isn't quite as straightforward as a layman might think. (For one, that law doesn't literally say "commercial" ("gewerbsmäßig"), but rather "geschäftsmäßig" ("business-like"), which doesn't require an intent to make money, but may include anything you plan on regularly doing).

2. Assuming you're referring to the Telemediengesetz, there's a second law (Medienstaatsvertrag) which mandates an imprint for anything that's not strictly for "personal or family purposes". Depending on who you ask, those two terms also require a rather narrow reading, so anything beyond a strictly private family diary (careful not to make references to any outside persons or businesses, though, because those entities will then have a legal interest in being able to identify you in case you malign them!) or family pictures or your private Dropbox replacement (ideally all the above should be password-protected and therefore not accessible by the general public anyway) might again already be in a grey area.

2b. Additionally, blogs can enter another grey area where depending on what and how you're blogging about, they might be classified as a journalistic service offering and therefore require an extended imprint, too.

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

#978

Post by FateOfNations »

YXNjaGVyZWdlbgo wrote: post #137
acnops wrote: post #129

AFAIK, this could be pretty disastrous for French businesses that funnel conversion data to Google Analytics, which is then used to optimize their Google Search ads. Switching to another solution for analytics might be ok, but losing the ability to automatically optimize ads based on conversion data is a big pain.

It doesn't really matter micro targeting is not effective.

Not effective? A dollar spent showing me, a male, a tampon ad is a dollar wasted.

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

#979

Post by iso1210 »

iggldiggl wrote: post #977
iso1210 wrote: post #804

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There isn't one There's a German law which says all commercial webpages have to say who runs it.

1. The legal definition of what's "commercial" under that law and what's not isn't quite as straightforward as a layman might think. (For one, that law doesn't literally say "commercial" ("gewerbsmäßig"), but rather "geschäftsmäßig" ("business-like"), which doesn't require an intent to make money, but may include anything you plan on regularly doing). 2. Assuming you're referring to the Telemediengesetz, there's a se…

So no EU regulation then

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

#980

Post by ineedasername »

pg_1234 wrote: post #917
ineedasername wrote: post #760

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If by those providers you mean Google, AWS etc. then that might not solve much. As subsidiaries of American corporations they would be obligated to hand over data to the parent corp, especially if the US DOJ required it. I think the only solution would be for them to not collect and store data from GDPR jurisdictions that would violate the GDPR if they were forced to hand it over to the parent American corp.

No, the subsidiary would be governed by European law, and would be prohibited from handing data over to either the US parent company or the US DOJ if that violated GDPR. The US parent company could not compel the subsidiary to violate the law of the region it was located in.

Yes, I suppose you're right, at least so long as they actually host their data in the EU.

But what happens when senior data scientists at Google want to do some analysis? Each dataset for each global region can't remain fractured from each other. The subsidiary may not have to hand it over to the US government but does the GDPR prevent data from leaving the EU zone? If not, then local copies in the US would be exposed.

I think there would be a lot of loopholes that needed to be closed. "Will be" a lot might be the better choice if words if France's decision becomes guiding legal doctrine in the region.

I don't think Google would willing give up that data either so they could be forced to change their practices to at least get that which allowable under EU law. And I don't want to get too slippery slope in this, but that could mean privacy-minded services begin using servers in the EU as an added layer of user privacy.

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