Yes, and when you go shopping and pay with cash in a store with no surveillance, your shopping habits are being shared against your wishes with a random third party (the external company bookkeeper).
It's disingenuous to have problems with websites collecting entirely anonymous browsing data -- that goes beyond any arguments for privacy and just steers into "yelling at clouds" territory.
That’s bad too. There are also things happening in the world that are much worse, like people getting murdered. All these things can be bad at the same time.
In what way? I agree that personally tracking an individual and using psychology tricks and whatnot to trick them into buying stuff is bad, but if it's just a company knowing what works well for them, I don't see the argument.
> when you go shopping and pay with cash in a store with no surveillance, your shopping habits are being shared against your wishes with a random third party
Retail stores also use your shopping data to target you with ads. Credit cards also obviously sell your purchase data to anyone willing to pay for it. I wouldn't be surprised if retail stores even sell your cash purchase data to any third party willing to pay for it.
The other replies are missing what analytics is really comparable to. With a standard purchase, we have an exchange of the minimum necessary information at the point of engaging in a mutual financial transaction. The bookkeeper can examine that transaction after. They can look for patterns in what receipts have. That's fine.
Analytics isn't that. Analytics is tracking a customer walking into the store and looking for which store they came from. Analytics is noting down how long a customer spent holding a blue item, if they looked at a big red item, and noting it down because it might matter. Analytics is seeing how the customer went back and forth between one aisle and another. Whether looking at one item made them less inclined to look at the next. Analytics is hoarding all of that information and keeping it even if the customer doesn't make a purchase.
Of course stores have been looking at how and why and when customers shop for years, but through consensual studies. They learnt to put the fruit at the entrance and the sweets at the exit. They learnt to put their high value items at eye level. And they didn't do it through spying and analysing the behaviours of everyone walking through their doors. They didn't keep years of CCTV with the sole excuse that they might want to see how long you lingered between deciding on diaper brands.
>Yes, and when you go shopping and pay with cash in a store with no surveillance, your shopping habits are being shared against your wishes with a random third party (the external company bookkeeper).
How, you don't enter your name when you pay with cash.
Also in EU is illegal to share any personal info in physical world too, say you go and make a subscription to a gym they can't share your data with a third party unless they make you sign a paper first.
>"Oh, it's that one privacy nut again who always wears sunglasses and a hoodie and only pays in cash"
And the store person will then what? Open excel wnd write "a dude with glasses was ehre at 12:51"? and then send the file to 100+ partners?
>You don't need to be identified by name, just by a "fingerprint". If you go there regularly you will be identified by your "fingerprint".
So the physical stores have some shady dudes attempting to lift fingerprints from money then some statistics guy try to put probabilities on which fingerprint matches which anonymous guy?
here in my country you still pay with cash and the store people put it in a machine combine it with money from other people, it will be a lot of work and risk for some shitty nano reward.
And the GDPR forbids them from writing that information (e.g. "the privacy nut bought apple juice") down or passing it to a third party without your explicit consent.
On the other hand, it's perfectly legal (and usual practice) to contract out the operation of people counting devices that just tally up how many persons go through a door.
(By the way, a gym can and usually does share contract data including personal information with numerous third-parties such as external bookkeepers. This is legal under the GDPR without explicit consent.)
>By the way, a gym can and usually does share contract data with numerous third-parties such as external bookkeepers. This is perfectly legal under the GDPR)
Why is it legal, does the gym need those 100 contractors to know my data for it to work? What are those for 100 different accountants? How did gyms or other businesses worked before the internet, did a guy walked to 100 different locations with papers in hand so those "partners" take a quick look?
Yes, before there was electronic bookkeeping businesses hauled stacks of paper to their accountant. This is standard business practice since literally centuries.
If they want to send you a letter, they have to give your data to the postal service. Again, no consent needed.
This is legal because our whole economy is based on devision of labor. Privacy laws account for that.
Maybe you are referring to required data.
I can buy some bread and the store does not need my ID for accounting purposes, so not sure what exceptional stores or gym need to send a copy of my ID and my activities to their accountant.
My problem is with the 100+ partners that are OBVIOUSLy not partners and not required to have my data.
Ok, now what's the difference between sharing "1 bread sold" (with no identifying information about the customer) with a third-party and "1 page visited" (with no identifying information about the visitor) with a third-party?
"1 page visited" (with no identifying information about the visitor) with a third-party?
False equivalence, no online stalking company actually works like that (that would require a server-side hook). They all make the visitor go to the third party's desk and increase the tally themselves (via http request), giving the tracker company access to all the contact details of the visitor.
"Why is it legal" is the wrong question. There is nothing wrong with freedom. You already know this. The problem is the lack of competition. You should be asking why is the competition so small for this particular service with bad terms that you can't find a better place around you that provides a better service.
The bookkeeper literally needs access to receipts and invoices to do their job. No bookkeeper is going to work from an anonymous list of payments; that's how you get swept up in a money laundering raid.
Before the internet, the owner took a shoe box of receipts to their bookkeeper every month. Those receipts had your name, date, etc. on them.
How, when I buy stuff in real world and pay with cash I don't ask for an Id Card, so why do you think the store needs names on the receipts? Is this something that happens in your country? For buying cars,land you need an Id, if I buy even an expensive electronics no Id is needed I just return the product and the receipt that has no name on it back.
I remember when my grandfather was doing accounting for a bar before Internet days, they papers were about the stuff not about people, like how many bear was bought, how much was sold stuff like that.
>your shopping habits are being shared against your wishes with a random third party (the external company bookkeeper).
GDPR requires data sharing to be done for a defined purpose.
The purpose of sharing data with an external company bookkeeper for bookkeeping is not remotely connected to any purpose an analytics service fulfills. So while the shared data is capable of the same insights, it's explicitly illegal for it to be processed that way without a defined purpose (which is it's own can of worms).
>entirely anonymous browsing data
It's never entirely anonymous, because how useful data is, is inversely related to how anonymous it is.
ergo it would only be truly anonymous if it was truly useless.
It's still legal to ask your bookkeeper to go through the books and give you a list of your 10 best selling products broken down by season (given you have all the right paperwork in place with them etc. but no consent of the customers needed).
Well, it's not necessary to process any personal data in order to calculate that.
Can you ask your bookkeeper to tell you the top 3 best selling products for your top 5 customers without declaring that the purpose of the data transfer to the external bookkeeper is also to run sales analytics?
It is necessary to process personal information for that purpose. That's what the sales records are.
> top 5 customers
You probably have to declare that the data is processed for that purpose in general terms but I don't see why consent would be necessary. Anyway, this analytics service claims it doesn't do this kind of analysis.
Obviously it depends on the system involved, but there should be no need to touch any column containing personally identifying information in order to calculate aggregate sales statistics for each of your products.
Nope, the external company bookkeeper doesn't know which of the hundreds or thousands transactions are done by me. He doesn't even know how often I bought something.
And even if, that knowledge is nothing compared to the millions of data points of services like google analytics.
If it were true as AdriaanvRossum said above that Simple Analytics data has "no identifiers" (taking that at face value for now) then that seems exactly analogous to those cash transactions someotherperson describes.
Simple Analytics absolutely does receive identifies (namely IP address). They claim they do not store these address, but that depends entirely on trusting them and their closed source software.
This is very unlike the accounting firm, which never receives any identifying for cash transactions and thus couldn't store it even if they wanted to.
I think you are wrong. What they receive is a set of purchases in a given period of time that allow them to make many important decisions (when people buy most, what purchases are more likely on a given date etc.) but there is no way of finding out my shopping habits.
no - the analysis is done on receipts, not just total products sold. They don't care what you bought, they care to know that people who buy diapers also buy wipes, and people who buy soy milk don't buy butter, etc. The analysis of anonymous receipts still yields very interesting and actionable results in aggregate. Your privacy has nothing to do with how a company analyzes its sales data as long as they don't include your identity and drill down into analyzing your receipt alone.
Yes, I understand that they see patterns and trends and a lot of valuable data: my point is that they have no way of tracking shopping habits of any individual purchaser unless they trick them into some loyalty program, coupons etc.
I think we agree. If the average search advertiser gave me the same benefits that some loyalty programs do, I'd feel a lot better about them. I.e. if I got points for the data I provided in my browsing habits that translated into actual dollars, I'd be game to let them have it. If I wanted to "not swipe my loyalty card for this purchase" to leave it out of my history, I'd appreciate the granular control.
The issue with all the tracking is that most consumers have no choice, no functional UI to interact with the tracking systems, and no clear idea of who they are ultimately transacting with.
With enough good data (so probably not in all sectors) you can also identify people out of the system.
Sure, it's technically possible. But if you would actually do that, you run afoul of the GDPR requirements for informed consent: retroactively identifying people in a dataset requires the same consent as targeted data hoovering, so if an individual has only consented to being included in anonymized statistics that practice is sure to get flagged down as unlawful.
Yes, that's definitely possible, but humans being human I doubt it can be 100% foolproof. If I go to the grocery store every Saturday at 11am and purchase a similar set of items, you can probably single me out and assign some UID to me. However, if I unexpectedly pop in Wednesday evening to just buy a bottle of wine, it would be difficult to assign the purchase to the same UID.
GDPR also applies to the real world. That store is definitely not allowed to share data about your shopping habits with some third party without your explicit consent. For example government departments in Germany have to aks for your explicit permission beforehand if they need to request/share data with a different department.
This is in general not true and German government departments share data with different departments all the time without explicit consent of the affected citizen. This is also not a good example as there are additional legal restrictions for government departments which businesses don't need to obey.
If the sharing is not required by any law they have to ask. Sometimes they do. I'm sure there are cases where they share without either of the precondition met.
GDPR is a standardisation of pre-existing national rules within the EU member states, at the time including the UK’s Data Protection Act. When I was at university, one of the examples of the scope of the Data Protection Act was a barbershop which kept hand-written (no computer involved) records of customers, and one customer used the DPA to demand to see their records and then to have those records destroyed.
GDPR has an exception for things that are necessary for the service the customer asked for. If you ordered something to be shipped to your home then the provider can share your address with the shipping company - that's required to fulfill their end of the deal. Sending your personal information to some 3rd party advertising company? Not so much.
If the seller can subcontract the delivery service, is there any reason they can't subcontract their accounts receivable?
I think the element you're missing is - of course this is OK, it happens all the time. What the comment you were responding to before wasn't making clear is that when it's done, there must be contractual provisions limiting the service provider's use of the data, so they can't use it for their own purposes.
It's disingenuous to have problems with websites collecting entirely anonymous browsing data -- that goes beyond any arguments for privacy and just steers into "yelling at clouds" territory.