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A comment on Use of Google Analytics declared illegal by French data protection authority. Parent comment

Re:Use of Google Analytics declared illegal by French data p... by hdjjhhvvhga on Thursday February 10, 2022 @10:12AM (#30287183)
> shopping habits

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.

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Re:Use of Google Analytics declared illegal by French data p... by abakker on Thursday February 10, 2022 @10:17AM (#30287283)
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.
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Re:Use of Google Analytics declared illegal by French data p... by hdjjhhvvhga on Thursday February 10, 2022 @10:21AM (#30287353)
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.
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Re:Use of Google Analytics declared illegal by French data p... by abakker on Thursday February 10, 2022 @10:28AM (#30287478)
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.

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Re:Use of Google Analytics declared illegal by French data p... by afiori on Thursday February 10, 2022 @10:35AM (#30287592)
As a nitpick: "unless they trick enough customers in a loyalty program or something".

With enough good data (so probably not in all sectors) you can also identify people out of the system.

There are not that many bits of entropy in (contextualized) human behavior.

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Re:Use of Google Analytics declared illegal by French data p... by tremon on Thursday February 10, 2022 @11:00AM (#30288039)
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.

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Re:Use of Google Analytics declared illegal by French data p... by hdjjhhvvhga on Sunday February 13, 2022 @03:54PM (#30325583)
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.
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