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Comment by omnimus | Hacker News Reader

Turns out that many officials believe this is fine. Companies using Plausible, Matomo and similar services have been under scrutiny.

IP adress is required for site to function - your server cant not collect it. Plausible also only processes it for uniqueness and doesnt save it as is. Interestingly most webservers/firewalls will have to keep track of ip adresses so they will be saved in acess logs and caches. Making them more problematic than Plausible. Yet its most likely fine because the intent is not to track individual users but to improve service/keep it runing. Plausible intent is also not track individual users but collect visitor counts which is something used for improving service too.

I think you might be prematurely spreading fear.

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> Turns out that many officials believe this is fine.

Who has gone on record with this, and in which jurisdictions?

I have experience from state funded projects from central european countries. Afaik what they battle/hate most is what goes against the spirit of the law. So mainly popups that are hyperdesigned to be confusing so people are forced or tricked or annoyed thus accepting everything. Another thing they battle is how long data is saved and where the data is shared. If you self host service like plausible or matomo that do everything thats possible to be compliant then it's fine.

I think there is marketing tactic ad/analytics companies and marketers use against services like Plausible. They say these services also require cookie popup and wont give you as much detailed info so why would you use them. Most websites would be fine with limited data Plausible provides but it breaks ad/analytics industry business plan.

I can understand your frustration regarding these tactics. Other services should outright be banned.

> Plausible also only processes it for uniqueness and doesnt save it as is

That's exactly the point. Processing of personal data to identify a unique person.

Regarding firewalls and logs: It's argued that this is legitimate interest as it is stated in Recital 49 of the GDPR. So they got a free pass, for the better or worth.

> I think you might be permanently spreading fear

Don't get me wrong, I like the approach. But it's not a get out of GDPR free card.

Legitimate interest still requires the data subject to be informed under Art 13. Not sure how that would be accomplished without at least an info banner. (This goes for server logs too.)

If you have a website you have to write this in your Privacy Policy and most do.

Firewalls are a curious case. It is argued that the data is not collected but transmitted to the controller. Almost as if you get a letter with personal data and now have to deal with it.

Yes, it's a stretch. Not happy with it but I don't see any practical solution either...

AFAIK it's not enough to write it in your privacy policy. Art 21 of the GDPR makes this explicit:

> (4) At the latest at the time of the first communication with the data subject, the right referred to in paragraphs 1 and 2 shall be explicitly brought to the attention of the data subject and shall be presented clearly and separately from any other information.

I am not a lawyer, but as far as I can tell, there is no legal way to collect PII (including IP address) or place tracking identifiers on the user's device without at least informing the user explicitly under the GDPR and the ePrivacy Directive.

You are correct. In early days of the GDPR people thought about a page in front of the original page without any data collection presenting only the privacy information.

But soon there was an agreement that Art 13 lit. 4 could be interpreted that as long as you don't have any data collection beyond server logs this would be deemed as sufficient. Or in other words if you won't invoke the Art 21 lit. 1 of the GDPR.

But since everybody wants to track you on basis of their legitimate interest the web became full of cookie banners

> That's exactly the point. Processing of personal data to identify a unique person.

Not sure thats what i said. They cannot identify unique person. They identify unique legitimate visits per one day.

If logs and firewalls mean legitimate interest because you have to give server your ip address for everything to work then using same thing can be said about plausible especially since the ip address is immediately thrown away unlike with firewalls where the main point is to keep record of bad actors.

It is very different to google analytics where whole point is to pinpoint repeating visitors, their behaviour etc. You simply can't do that with service like plausible. What you can do is know how many legitimate visits you had and what was visited. For most websites that is enough at same time i would be surprised if not knowing how many people visited your site would not be legitimate requirement for service to function.

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