French Regulator Says Google Analytics Poses Data Risks

Google Analytics, the world’s most widely used web analytics service developed by Alphabet’s Google, risks giving US intelligence services access to French website users’ data, France’s watchdog CNIL said on Thursday.

In a decision targeting an unnamed French website manager, the data privacy regulator — one of the most vocal and influential in Europe — said the US tech giant hadn’t taken sufficient measures to guarantee data privacy rights under European Union regulation when data was transferred between Europe and the United States.
“These (measures) are not sufficient to exclude the accessibility of this data to US intelligence services,” the regulator said in a statement.

“There is therefore a risk for French website users who use this service and whose data is exported.”

The CNIL said that the French website manager in question had one month to comply with EU regulation and that it had issued similar orders to other website operators.
The CNIL’s decision follows a similar one by its Austrian counterpart, coming after complaints by Vienna-based noyb (Non Of Your Business), an advocacy group founded by Austrian lawyer and privacy activist Max Schrems who won a high profile case with Europe’s top court in 2020.

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