Slashdot Mirror
Google Analytics May Be Illegal In Germany
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."
Everything is illegal in Germany.
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?
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
I found about google analytics when I started using the NoScript plugin. Its used almost everywhere!
"Do, we didn't illegally disclose your data; we open-sourced it!"
Information theory is life. The rest is just the KL divergence.
FYI: In 2000 1 dollar was 1.083 euros (enl. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tables_of_historical_exchange_rates_to_the_USD). Why would it be 25000 eur more ten years ago? Anyway, 75000/1.083 is 69250.
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.
I don't understand people saying that Google knows too much about each of us. Maybe I haven't been paying close enough attention as of late, but has Google ever done wrong by their users? And besides, as an entirely uninteresting person, 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. I don't care if the supermarket "Man" knows that I buy excessive amounts of phallic vegetables and personal lubricant (unrelated).
But it's still disappointing. And I don't think the Dollar will ever get back to where it was.
It's NOT me! It's the meds! I'm on 1000mg of Fukitol.
The Euro was introduced in 2002. 10 years ago that would have been in Deutschmark.
The Euro was introduced January 1st, 1999. In 2002, the Euro cash was introduced, up til then, the old national coins and bills were used as "regional" denominations of the Euro. But they were no independent currencies anymore.
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.
Adblock Plus doesn't block anything by default. It does present you with a list of filter subscriptions. Just install EasyPrivacy from the same folks who probably made the subscription you use now (EasyList).
$ make available
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!
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a skull.
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.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
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 appropriate feature set. Piwik is somewhat close, but it doesn't support PostgreSQL, which is a show-stopper for me - installing a second RDBMS just for a single auxiliary application is out of question. Besides, it's still probably going to be blocked by NoScript and the likes.
So, what other options do I have?
This is Slashdot. Common sense is futile. You will be modded down.
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.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Before getting too paranoid about google analytics, take a look at the actual cookies it stores. E.G. in Firefox "Tools", "Options", "Show Cookies", search for "__utmz". Whoa, there are a few hundred. Check out the one from Slashdot - in my case: "9273847.1252068577.1.1.utmcsr=(direct)|utmccn=(direct)|utmcmd=(none)". "9273847" means "slashdot.org". "1252068577" means me, when I go to Slashdot. The rest of the stuff has to do with how I found the site. But now look at __utmz for say, pennyarcade.com: "84531096.1252070740.1.1.utmcsr=(direct)|utmccn=(direct)|utmcmd=(none)". It's a different web site ID, but it's also a different user ID. There's no correlation between the person who goes to slashdot, and the person who goes to pennyarcade. Google can't tell that they're both me. My ID is different on every single web site that uses Google analytics. The only purpose of the ID is so that, for a single given website, they can tell the difference between one person visiting it a hundred times, or a hundred people each visiting it one time. There's no other personally identifiable information tied to that number. Your analytics cookies on all those sites are not correlated with each other; they're not tracking everything you do.
Am I the only one who thinks it's funny that they point to a Google translation of a story how Google analytics may be illegal in Germany? ;-)