[HN Gopher] Consent, GDPR and Google Analytics
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       Consent, GDPR and Google Analytics
        
       Author : fenier
       Score  : 43 points
       Date   : 2022-02-13 19:24 UTC (3 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (cunderwood.dev)
 (TXT) w3m dump (cunderwood.dev)
        
       | adithyasrin wrote:
       | This is going to be a hot topic in Germany once the German courts
       | rule it out. Should it say it's illegal to load, we have got
       | loads of work in front of us. One simpler solution that I have
       | seen Zaraz by Cloudflare, which seems to solve this issue. Has
       | anyone had experiences with this?
       | 
       | https://blog.cloudflare.com/keep-analytics-tracking-data-in-...
        
         | fenier wrote:
         | The author of the blog apparently also wrote about Zaraz in
         | this post:
         | 
         | https://cunderwood.dev/2022/01/30/tag-management-is-no-longe...
        
         | speedgoose wrote:
         | Cloudflare is from USA so it's a quick decision to take.
        
         | cassianoleal wrote:
         | Still an US corporation, subject to the CLOUD Act.
        
       | nonrandomstring wrote:
       | What a tangled web of legal niceties and hypothetical
       | interpretations we've woven here. But the moral arithmetic,
       | toward which European thought is tending, is more brutal and
       | something to which American corporations had better pay serious
       | attention to if they want to keep playing this game.
       | 
       | In general; we hold that "ignorance of law is no excuse", yet in
       | contract law _capacity_ is a key construct, and ignorance very
       | much _does_ play a part. It's not just minors, the mentally-ill,
       | or those incapacitated by drugs or alcohol, discombobulated or
       | bamboozled by other means, who cannot give consent in a
       | contractual relation. In an age where most lawyers and judges,
       | like everyone, mindlessly click-through "agreements" and shrink-
       | wrap EULAs, there's a strong and growing argument to be made that
       | non-expert adults lack genuine capacity to understand
       | technologically mediated relations.
       | 
       | In other words, it's the contract law that underlies this stuff
       | that's coming up for revision, not the surface interpretations.
       | The important matter now is not deliberating whether the letter
       | of the law creates "consent" on this or that occasion, but
       | whether the spirit of the law allows for consent even in
       | principle, given societal standards of digital literacy and the
       | complexity of modern digital interactions.
        
       | shoto_io wrote:
       | I'm not the biggest fan of Ben Evans, but he's right on "privacy
       | fanatism":
       | 
       |  _> At a certain point EU privacy regulators will realise: When
       | an EU citizen requests a US internet resource, they provide a US
       | server with their IP address; An IP address is PII; The CIA could
       | record that; Therefore it is illegal to provide any internet
       | resource to anyone in the EU_
       | 
       | Source:
       | https://twitter.com/benedictevans/status/1492102034409066504
       | 
       | PS: saying this a German citizen...
        
         | MauranKilom wrote:
         | Providing the IP address for the communication channel is quite
         | obviously necessary and does not require explicit consent.
         | 
         | https://gdpr-text.com/read/article-49/#para_gdpr-a-49_1_1b
         | 
         |  _> In the absence of an adequacy decision pursuant to Article
         | 45(3), or of appropriate safeguards pursuant to Article 46,
         | [...] a transfer [...] of personal data to a third country or
         | an international organisation shall take place only on one of
         | the following conditions:
         | 
         | > [...]
         | 
         | > (b) the transfer is necessary for the performance of a
         | contract between the data subject and the controller or the
         | implementation of pre-contractual measures taken at the data
         | subject's request
         | 
         | > [...]_
         | 
         | GDPR does not forbid providing internet resources to EU users,
         | that is simply a lie. All it requires is that data handling
         | happens in the best interest of the user.
        
           | nickpp wrote:
           | Recent court orders in Germany and France beg to differ.
        
         | marcosdumay wrote:
         | Yes, taking it literally at the extreme case, the rule is
         | unreasonable.
         | 
         | But Google Analytics is the kind of thing the Law was created
         | to stop, it's not an unreasonable unintended effect.
        
         | kuschku wrote:
         | There's no issue with that. If a person manually takes their
         | information and mails it to the CIA, that's also fine.
         | 
         | The issue is if a person visits a resource from a company in
         | the EU, they should be able to expect that that information
         | won't be passed along to any third party that's not absolutely
         | necessary. Especially not to foreign governments.
         | 
         | You wouldn't expect a visit to latimes.com to leak your
         | information to the Chinese Party either.
        
           | throwhauser wrote:
           | > The issue is if a person visits a resource from a company
           | in the EU
           | 
           | Does it have to be a company in the EU? I thought the GDPR
           | covered any website an EU citizen, resident, or visitor might
           | use, in which case US-based websites might have contradictory
           | obligations to the GDPR and US law.
        
             | fenier wrote:
             | It depends on Art 3.
             | 
             | https://gdpr-info.eu/art-3-gdpr/
             | 
             | Just because a website exists and may be visited by a EU
             | resident, does not mean that the site automatically has to
             | comply.
        
           | nr2x wrote:
           | Do they have a TikTok?
        
         | pjc50 wrote:
         | Extraterritorial jurisdiction + global nature of the internet
         | causes these problems. We've already seen lots of the reverse:
         | it's illegal to provide gambling to Americans.
         | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Scheinberg
         | 
         | It's also legally difficult to provide bank accounts to
         | Americans: https://www.thelocal.fr/20210924/why-americans-are-
         | finding-i...
         | 
         | Then there was the whole incompatible court orders in re Azure:
         | https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/5/17203630/us-v-microsoft-sc...
         | 
         | Really the only workable outcomes are a global agreement on
         | internet-touching governance (which the US will never accept on
         | principle) or Balkanization. Or I suppose an eternal chasing
         | into new as yet unbanned services.
        
           | madrox wrote:
           | I suspect there's a third outcome within crypto many are
           | quietly pursuing. Looked through the lens of "what if the
           | internet were its own country" a lot of web3 makes a bit more
           | sense.
           | 
           | Or maybe I've read too many Neal Stephenson novels.
        
             | pjc50 wrote:
             | That was my "eternal chasing into new as yet unbanned
             | services". The ban wave has largely caught up with big
             | ICOs, but not with "governance tokens" or "NFT based
             | communities".
             | 
             | There's going to be a cycle of "web3 gets big money", "big
             | money fraud in web3", "SEC enforcement against web3", and
             | then the launch of "web4" in 2030.
        
       | anothernewdude wrote:
       | Just don't opt in to Google Analytics. I don't.
        
         | SquareWheel wrote:
         | There's an opt-out, but not an opt-in for Google Analytics.
         | Unless you're referring to simply blocking it via a content
         | blocker script.
        
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       (page generated 2022-02-13 23:00 UTC)