Austria considers the usage of Google analytics illegal as it exposes Europeans to US spy agencies

Europe's tough General Data Protection Regulation has mainly been seen as a problem for Big Tech. Now it's becoming a real problem for European customers U.S. cloud services.

FREMONT, CA: In an Austrian case involving someone who visited a health-related website that employs Google Analytics, the world's most extensively used toolkit for website owners to analyze the manner in which people interact with the site, European privacy campaigners claimed partial victory.

The website's proprietors, according to the Austrian Data Protection Authority, violated the GDPR by sending the user's data to Google in the United States. Sending personal data to a corporation in the United States is illegal if that company cannot ensure the data's safety from US intelligence services, according to a landmark judgement by the EU's top court in 2020. No American corporation can guarantee because of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) in the United States.

The consequences may be far-reaching. While this complaint only included one website publisher, it was one of 101 filed by Big Tech entrepreneur Max Schrems and his NOYB ("None of your business") privacy advocacy group at the same time, a year and a half ago.