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Comments: 241 +- Your Rights Online: Google Analytics May Be Illegal In Germany on Tuesday November 24, @06:19PM
Posted
by
kdawson
on Tuesday November 24, @06:19PM
from the schmafe-harbor dept.
from the schmafe-harbor dept.
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privacy
sopssa sends in a TechCrunch story that begins "Several federal and regional government officials in Germany are trying to put a ban on Google Analytics, the search giant's free software product that allows website owners and publishers to get detailed statistics about the number, whereabouts, and search behavior of their visitors (and much more)." Here's Google's translation of the article from Zeit Online (original in German). A German lawyer cited there says that penalties for websites that uses Google Analytics could amount to €50,000 (about $75,000). Reader sopssa adds, "The amount of data Google collects from everywhere on the Internet is indeed huge, and website owners should be using a local open source alternative to keep visitor data private."
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Schadenfreude (Score:5, Funny)
Everything is illegal in Germany.
Re:Schadenfreude (Score:5, Funny)
Everything is illegal in Germany.
Bullshit. Only if its usefull for anything.
Otherwise the chances of it being illegal are merely high.
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Sssh. You're not supposed to mention 'H'. And whatever you do, don't talk about the war.
Re:Schadenfreude (Score:5, Insightful)
Except saying bad words on TV or being naked in public :)
Parent
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and drinking alcohol in public (including parks and public transport)
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You're not as far off the deutchmark as you think.
There, fixed that for you.
Re:Schadenfreude (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Schadenfreude (Score:4, Insightful)
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Frankfurt airport really sucks. Try DUS sometimes, it is much more relaxed and friendly.
Re:Schadenfreude (Score:4, Informative)
I call bullshit.
The German policemen have a handgun, that's it.
As far as I know they don't have a shotgun in the trunk or anything.
Policemen with more armament are the German equivalent of SWAT or riot troops (say when a major league soccer game is on or a high profile demonstration).
Parent
Re:Schadenfreude (Score:5, Informative)
I wonder how your friend managed to see such heavy armed police that often. I actually live in germany and the normal police officer has his normal gun and nothing else. I only see police with automatic weapons at the airport. I have never seen police with grenades and neither with bandoleers. I think your friend is full of shit.
Says the guy who does not even have firsthand experience of seeing german police? When talking about mere perceived threat, juding by what i occasionally see on tv news, i would feel much more threatened by the police and other security in the USA, carrying nasty stuff like teasers and so. I've never seen a machine gun outside of a german airport, and the only other weapon beside the normal police gun i have seen with german police was a club. And this is very unusual as well.
So stop spreading second hand bullshit.
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Hey, don't tease me bro!
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Legally police in the US need to be carrying a non-lethal weapon if they're armed, so they have options before handling their pistol.
Maybe, but what has that got to do with tasers [healthdiaries.com]?
Re:Schadenfreude (Score:5, Insightful)
Sorry, disregard my other posting, something went wrong.
I'm german and i actually feel that i'm in a very free country, thank you very much. Yes, there are some laws which i disagree with, but overall it is fine.
Complete bullshit. You can say a lot about nazis and the nazi era. You can discuss this, and you are even free to utter dumb sentences like "not everything was bad in nazi germany" (which is technically spoken true, but a dumb statement nethertheless as a german tv personality badly learned a while a ago).
You are only banned from showing symbols like the swastika, play/sing some songs like the "Horst Wessel Lied" (horst wessel song, hymn of the nazi party), deny the holocaust or praise the unlawful nazi regime. But even doing this will most of the time not lead you into jail. A fine will do in most cases.
Now you might argue that this is against freedom of speech, but as a german i feel that given our history there is very good reason to ban said things, especially denying the holocaust. Our ancestors have done enough harm to e.g. jews, there is no need to further harm them by allowing to state that the horror they (the few who were not killed) encountered actually never happened.
Yes, you could go on with bullshit claims, but this still puts germany nowhere near china. Not quite as bad? That is the understatement of the year.
Still the fact is that free speech is actually provided in germany. But most of us germans (and europeans in general) have a different feeling of the meaning of free speech. Free speech is fine, but the right to it ends where others are harmed. I don't have a problem with that, and most people i know don't have either. This concept might be hard to grasp for a citizen of the United States, but i'm still fine with it and i don't feel that i'm missing some of the banned speech.
I take it that you are from the US. People like you also have a long way to go until you will finally understand that the us american believes are not the holy grail to which the whole world needs to subscribe.
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Re:Schadenfreude (Score:4, Insightful)
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So you have free speech by you can't freely say the the holocaust didn't happen, In most free countries free speech is the right to say anything no matter how ignorant with out penalty under the law. There are two exemptions yelling fire in a theater and calling for violence, everything else is protected.
That's not true. There are a multitude of exceptions even under US law, which has the strongest free speech protections in the world. The general rule is that to restrict speech, the government must show that the measure is narrowly tailored to serve a compelling interest. Some types of speech that are illegal in the US, randomly off the top of my head: defamation; false advertising; inciting crime; cigarette advertising in many contexts; obscenity; lying in court or to police or a grand jury; breaking a
Ridiculous. (Score:5, Insightful)
If you come to my website then I, or my designated party, have the right to record the fact that you came to my website. If you don't like it then don't use the web. Is it also against the law to record what customers come in the door of your brick and mortar store in Germany?
Re:Ridiculous. (Score:5, Informative)
There are however data protection laws in place and especially about storing personal information in other countries. From the article:
This isn’t the first time German privacy protection officials have voiced their concerns about the Google Analytics service, as it had earlier criticized the search giant over keeping everyone ‘in the dark’ about which information they’re collecting exactly and how much identifiable data is sent to and stored on servers located on U.S. soil. German laws prohibit such data to leave the country, they claim.
If you or your website is giving such personal info to other party and it's stored elsewhere, you will be just as liable. And let's be honest, Google is able to profile people really good. German authorities are especially worried about political parties and pharmaceutical companies websites.
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Re:Ridiculous. (Score:5, Interesting)
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Analytics isn't really an advertising tool. It just keeps statistics on things obvious to the web server when you connect to it. IP address, location, referring page, browser, etc. It's like knowing that a middle-aged white male in a red sweatshirt came in the door.
Not local (Score:5, Informative)
It just keeps statistics on things obvious to the web server when you connect to it. IP address, location, referring page, browser, etc.
But these statistics aren't run local on the webserver itself. They are transmitted to Google.
It's like knowing that a middle-aged white male in a red sweatshirt came in the door.
No.
It's like *telling Big Brother* that a middle-aged white male in a red sweatshirt came in the door of your house.
And asking Big Brother to do some statistics about who comes to your house for you.
Sure from the website's owner point of view, the result is the same : he/she got on who visits the site.
BUT from the *user* point of view it is different : The user accepted the fact that, by entering your house, you'll know the users' age/sex/clothes colour. BUT the user never accepted in the first place that you also send these informations to big brother.
The EU regulate clearly what you can transmit to 3rd party.
Here the problem is not that website are doing *stastistics* (they can the information is trivial).
The problem is that, in order to compute said stats, the websites *forwards* the data to google : a 3rd party which has nothing to do in the first palce.
The solution : Use adblock and/or noscript.
Parent
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If it's a German business, it's bound by German law. Having the webhosting in the U.S. won't help in that case.
Re:Not local (Score:4, Insightful)
It's like *telling Big Brother* that a middle-aged white male in a red sweatshirt came in the door of your house.
No, it's like telling a guy at a marketing company that a middle-aged white male in a red sweatshirt came in the door of your business.
A marketing company that is paying you or has some type of agreement with you to supply such information.
No. Google tracking cookies are unique to a single browser profile. Thats usually even a single user account.
So it's like letting "big brother" now, that the SAME person that used his credit card, issued to "Henry Johnson, Whatever Rd 34 (full adress)" at Walmart 2 hours ago, and who watched "Nuns with leather & whips" porn site 2 days ago, just came in the door of your house. Oh and yes, he's wearing a red sweatshirt.
Parent
Re:Ridiculous. (Score:4, Informative)
It's not really about you recording the fact that someone came to your website. The article says that there are worries that Google could further use the data, and eg connect it with the data they might have from Google Mail or other sites using Google Analytics, thus generating profiles about habits and preferences etc. If you use Google Mail, it is your own decision, but you might not be aware if you visit a site using Google Analytics and that not only the site owner records the fact that you were there, but Google knows, too (including all other Google Analytics sites you were visiting).
According to the article, nothing is decided. There is also some dispute whether the above scenario is possible under Google's own usage terms. Currently, it's a discussion among the data protection officials from the various German states. So, currently, they are basically doing their job.
Parent
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You don't have that right if the laws don't give it to you. Don't like the laws, move elsewhere.
Complete nonsense. (Score:4, Insightful)
Dear Sir or Madam,
this is acutally complete nonsense.
If you choose to publish, you have no right whatsoever to track who is reading your publication for what reason.
Parent
Re:Ridiculous. (Score:5, Informative)
Is it also against the law to record what customers come in the door of your brick and mortar store in Germany?
Depends. It is illegal to store their name, home address, passport number and blood type just because they wanted to shop at your place, yes.
And rightly so. You do business under the law of the land, so the law of the land tells you how you can do it. If you don't like it, you can shove off to some place in the middle of Africa where they don't have laws.
Parent
Re:Ridiculous. (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not quite as cut-and-dry as you think.
It could very well be illegal to follow you around the store and record every product you looked at, and then follow you around the library and see every book you look at (and then examine the records to see what you have ever checked out), then followed you to the video store and measured exactly how much time you spent looking at each title (and also examine your rental history).
The Germans lived through both the Nazis and with the KGB. They have a good reason to be sensitive about protecting people's privacy.
Parent
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A "usage profile" for a user ID is also considered illegal if the user hasn't opted in or it is at least clear that the data is being collected. This is because those stats are not really anonymous. If they were, Google wouldn't be interested in them. It has been shown repeatedly that tracking back "anonymous" profiles to a RL user isn't hard if you have enough data.
Blocked with NoScript (Score:2, Informative)
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Re:Blocked with NoScript (Score:5, Informative)
Install the RequestPolicy add-on and browse
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Fortunately, they don't sneak around a HOSTS file very easily. (I suppose they could replace themselves with their own IP addresses, but that defeats the purpose of DNS, and would render them visually indistinguishable from malware. Which, in a sense, they are...)
Open source? (Score:4, Funny)
"Do, we didn't illegally disclose your data; we open-sourced it!"
What's one of the #1 blocked items in my browser? (Score:2)
Google Analytics
Just behind doubleclick.net
It never makes a noticeable difference to have both disabled so far.
Another reason to avoid Internet Explorer until it gets a no script equivalent (which it never will).
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, it makes. For the website author who just wants to have the goddamned statistics presented in a convinient, easy-to-digest format to be able to focus on actual improvements to the website, and not on wrestling with half-arsed local statistics generators that use access logs, 1px images, session cookies and somesuch.
As a website admin, I'd gladly switch to a solution that does not raise such concerns as GA, but there is none of comparable quality and I'm not in position to make my own with an appropria
Has Google ever betrayed our trust? (Score:2, Interesting)
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but has Google ever done wrong by their users?
And would you ever know? Are you sure that the prices you find on line are the same ones I see? Some manufacturers of luxury goods might not even want "your kind" seen in public with their product (replace "your kind" with whatever socio-economic group you want). Maybe you can't even see their web pages in a search.
I don't really care if Google knows my surfing habits. I hear the same argument against the club cards at supermarkets, and the same response applies.
In addition to the loyalty club discount, I also get an additional percentage knocked off at the cash register. Plus, I get rebates. Because they like me. I'm a desirable customer. You, not so mu
Oh, that will improve things (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, I certainly want my personal data tracked and stored by 200 small-to-medium businesses that don't understand net security rather than one company with the knowledge and resources to do it well. I feel safer already!
Hell froze over. (Score:3, Funny)
Government wants to ban a proprietary tool serving obtaining vast amounts of data about the net users by a big corporation, without the users' content. The government suggests an open-source alternative.
Slashdot crowd violently opposes.
brb checking if RMS applied for a job at Microsoft.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Said big corporation is Google. Google can't do wrong, you know?
Take a look at your cookies (Score:4, Informative)
Google translation (Score:3, Insightful)
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Re:Oh noes! They stored a cookie! (Score:4, Informative)
And they are storing that cookie everywhere on the internet now a days. Google can build a pretty accurate profile about you (unless you've blocked it, but 'casual' people usually don't)
Have you actually used the Analytics service? It shows very detailed information about visitors, where they are coming from and what they do on the website. There's tons of statistics and other stuff available, and Google can track the individual people across the internet.
Parent
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Google Analytics records how many times you have been to the site, for report purposes. Now multiply by the number of websites that have Analytics "installed" and it's pretty clear that Google can make a good profile of almost all your web accesses.
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Adblock Plus doesn't block anything by default. It does present you with a list of filter subscriptions. Just install EasyPrivacy [adblockplus.org] from the same folks who probably made the subscription you use now (EasyList).