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."

Comments

Schadenfreude

[Anonymous Coward]

Everything is illegal in Germany.

Re:Schadenfreude

[kju]

Sorry, disregard my other posting, something went wrong.

I've said it once and I'll say it again: Germany is not a free country.

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.

and then you can't say anything about Nazis or face jail time or some other severe penalty

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.

I could go on on but in short I put Germany up there with China, not quiet as bad

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.

but still the fact that free speech is merely an illusion

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.

there makes me feel that Germany has a ways to go in terms of personal liberties when compared to several other democratic countries in the western world.

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.

Re:Blocked with NoScript

[al0ha]

Actually, NoScript only does part of the job, google-analytics.com, coremetrics.com, any many other ad/tracking entities sneak around NoScript on many sites, including /.

Install the RequestPolicy add-on and browse /. again, you will see what I mean.

Not local

[DrYak]

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.