I’ve never solicited the forum admins. If you read correctly, I actually acknowledged how tremendous of a job they’ve been doing providing exceptional support to everyone’s questions and concerns—including mine. They’re employees of Google, none of this is their fault.
As to your point about this plugin being GDPR compliant, it is not in my opinion.
I know that you’re likely trying to convince yourself that it is because of the years of data you may have and use to promote your marketing efforts for whatever agenda you have (i.e. business Ad ROI) but I believe that it is not—despite what Google says.
For this to be fully compliant there needs to be a way ON the website you use it for the visitors to give their consent. There also needs a way to consent for each category of data that is collected and what it is used for (i.e. necessary cookies, marketing cookies, functional cookies, etc.)
Nowhere does this plugin allow you to do any of that from what I’m being told by James and Renee.
Also, don’t let them fool you. Anonymizing the data is not enough as per GDPR laws as it’s a very high bar that is set and often falls short as demonstrated here
And these fantastic employees (Renee and James) know this. You can tell by their indirect responses and their haste reaction to letting the team know about this in this forum topic and also this one
The truth is that Google is on the verge of losing a huge source of income due to the new data privacy laws that are getting more serious by the day. These new laws make it difficult to use their premier services (analytics, ads, adsense, tag manager, etc.) because their remarketing tools are not GDPR compliant if there’s no way for users to give their consent in allowing us website owners to legally use these powerful and extremely effective tools .
Google has taken a very unethical and unlawful approach in trying to save their company with the release of Google Site Kit and many other workarounds. I think this plugin can ABSOLUTELY be GDPR compliant, but it isn’t right now. And that puts website owners like you at serious fines that I’m sure Google will not compensate you for.
Apple is the one who started this initial push into the whole “customer data is important” argument. They’re the ones pushing over there in Europe.
Apple doesn’t care about data protection. They care about taking Google out. And they’re lobbying for Data Privacy rights because Apple knows that eliminates a huge chunk of Google’s income: ads and marketing.
I understand Google feels the pressure of that but the too-soon-to-be-released Google Site Kit is just one of the many moves that they should be held accountable for.
Maybe I’m wrong about how I feel about Google Site Kit but for anyone who knows, the GDPR and new Data Privacy Laws are fluid and as clear as mud. They’re changing every day and nothing is clear. And I think Google knows this and is using this to their advantage. They’re a big enough company where they can try and let things like a non-GDPR compliant Google Site Kit slip out of legality as a means of trying to save their business.
This is just my opinion on the matter. I didn’t intend to bash on anyone. My intent was to raise awareness about an amazing plugin that isn’t quite ready yet (in my opinion) so that website owners aren’t legally liable for having to fork up 4% of their global revenue or $20m (whatever comes first) for not being fully GDPR compliant.
