Stop Using Google Analytics, Warns Sweden's Privacy Watchdog (techcrunch.com) 18
Sweden's data protection watchdog has issued a couple of fines in relation to exports of European users' data via Google Analytics which it found breach the bloc's privacy rulebook owing to risks posed by U.S. government surveillance. It has also warned other companies against use of Google's tool. From a report: The fines -- just over $1.1 million for Swedish telco Tele2 and less than $30,000 for local online retailer CDON -- are notable as they are the first such fines following a raft of strategic privacy complaints targeting Google Analytics (and Facebook Connect) back in August 2020.
The regulator found that so-called supplementary measures applied by Google to European users' data sent to the U.S. for processing were insufficient to raise the level of protection to the required legal standard. Including Google's use of IP address truncation (an anonymization measure) as, in the Tele2 case, it said the company did not clarify whether the truncation was performed before or after the transfer of the data to the U.S. so had failed to demonstrate there is "no potential access to the entire IP address before the last octet is truncated." The watchdog also found breaches of the bloc's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) rules on transfers to third countries in the case of two other companies' use of Google Analytics, Coop and Dagens Industries, but did not issue fines in those cases.
The regulator found that so-called supplementary measures applied by Google to European users' data sent to the U.S. for processing were insufficient to raise the level of protection to the required legal standard. Including Google's use of IP address truncation (an anonymization measure) as, in the Tele2 case, it said the company did not clarify whether the truncation was performed before or after the transfer of the data to the U.S. so had failed to demonstrate there is "no potential access to the entire IP address before the last octet is truncated." The watchdog also found breaches of the bloc's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) rules on transfers to third countries in the case of two other companies' use of Google Analytics, Coop and Dagens Industries, but did not issue fines in those cases.
Just read the article title... (Score:2)
Google Analytics is blocked 100% of the time (Score:3)
in my NoScript and my uBlock Origin. That and Google Fonts, and Google Tag Manager.
Regardless of the site, regardless of whatever else I need to re-enable temporarily to get that site halfway working enough, those 3 things never, EVER get turned on because they serve no purpose for the functionality of the site I visit: they just feed Google data.
And I don't care that it skews the analytics for the site I visit: it's more important not to feed Google data or mess up their data.
Re: (Score:2)
GDPR (Score:4, Informative)
Here is a Matomo article about Google Analytics and its GDPR compliance: https://piwik.pro/blog/is-goog... [piwik.pro] Note that Matomo has a free and open source competitor.
...and self-hostable. (Score:2)
Note that Matomo has a free and open source competitor.
That you can therefor self-host. The institute I work for did exactly that.
Turned it off (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Yes please! Rid us of Google over here in Europe.
Re: Google should... (Score:1)
Google Analytics is a JS Rube Goldberg Machine (Score:5, Insightful)
I know I'm an old man, but I prefer the good old days when you analyzed your server-side logs, not send JavaScript telemetry via AJAX to a 3rd party, making every tiny e-commerce site a giant JavaScript application. It's like a case study of inefficiency.
Remember the days when useful sites just loaded an HTML page...maybe did some validation in JavaScript and your page loaded quickly and scrolled efficiently and your laptop didn't sound like a jet engine just loading WalMart.com and it's million surveillance JavaScripts? If I could go back in time 20 years and tell past me how much computing power each desktop had, he'd weep for joy...then I'd tell him that all pages are actually slower due to JavaScript stupidity...then he'd weep with sorrow.
Warns Sweden's Privacy Watchdog? (Score:4)
Ordered, not warned. With a fine.
Re: (Score:2)
Which in itself is strange. Since when is the watchdog going after end users of a product rather than the provider of a product within the jurisdiction where it is sold? I would suspect these fines wouldn't hold up to legal scrutiny, and why aren't they dragging Google through the courts?
Webalizer? (Score:2)
I wonder if this would give rise to any "webalizer" type products? You know, the ones that just read the web server logs and draw graphs from it. Webalizer and the like are pretty primitive, but there's no reason a more sophisticated option couldn't be made (perhaps that filters out known spam traffic, bots etc). I know Splunk has some sort of 'templates' for this sort of thing, I'm sure other log aggregators do too...?
What GA does that a log file analyser can't is to get oodles of extra information out of
Good! (Score:2)
If Europe compels companies to move away from it, we may finally see alternatives that are self-hosted start getting some better traction. There's no reason to be sending all of that data to Google when you could be collecting it yourself, and most of that data needn't even be collected yourself in the first place. If this tanks Google's advertising business because they can't target ads or monetize them as effectively, all the better.
GA Alternative... (Score:2)
If you're looking for one, Matomo is an open-source, self hosted solution that has no GDPR problems. Used to be called Piwik.
https://matomo.org/