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What if digital sovereignty started with an elimination of the trackers (cookies)?

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A news published in BDM on January 13th caught my attention, it’s the announcement of Austria that using #googleanalytics would be a violation of the #rgpd. This decision of the equivalent of the Austrian CNIL made me wonder about these famous cookies and what their use implies

 

What are cookies ?

 

The easiest way is to refer to the definition given by the CNIL (Definition of a tracker), which lists 5 types of trackers. But among all these trackers, there are two main categories: the first one allows to ensure security elements such as authentication, or to keep in memory actions (content of a shopping cart during an online purchase for example). The second major category is those that will collect your personal information and identify your browsing activities. These will collect your IP address, even the mac address of your terminal (physical identifier), the type of OS or browser you use and personal data such as age, gender, etc…

This is what these small files that you can accept or not, will eventually collect.

 

Why these tracers ?

 

As you can see from the analysis of the two main categories of trackers, the first category is mainly used to improve navigation and to constitute a necessary element for security (authentication) on the various sites, these trackers are often indispensable, as are those that will allow you not to lose the contents of your shopping cart when you are browsing a commercial site…

The other trackers have no interest for you. On the other hand, they represent a gold mine for the different sites that can collect information about you and your habits. And above all, this data will be exploited by the #magaf and then sold to companies in order to offer targeted marketing services… This last category of trackers is therefore key for a whole industry that has been created around data, or rather your data.…

 

And googleanalytics in there ?

 

It is a platform for analyzing these trackers that we have talked about. And it allows you to define and categorize precisely where your site visitors come from and who they are. For you, it is indeed interesting and it can allow you to adjust your editorial line, the layout of your site, and this to improve your targeting. To increase your visibility and your ranking in search engines, you will be approached by many companies specialized in SEO (Search Engine Optimization) which will offer a series of services to improve your ranking … Be aware, however, that large e-commerce companies such as Amazon, pay for their referencing, so it is unlikely that if you are a small player you can appear on the first page of search …

In addition, thanks to this, Google collects a lot of personal information on most of the Internet users, accumulating huge databases that allow it to propose more and more precise profiles to marketing companies, but above all, it also allows it to acquire a fine understanding of these behaviors for its own use…

When we want to talk about digital sovereignty and data protection, the subject of trackers is obviously an important point to address … But we guess, touching it or avoiding it, would involve a radical change in approaches, including all web agencies, or marketing automation solution for many French digital players.

What alternatives and why?

 

So we need to change our paradigm, there are different approaches to free ourselves little by little from the grip of the #MAGAF on our electronic lives and our data. In mobile telephony, there is for example the eFoundation initiative which offers the possibility to use phones free of data plundering by Google or Apple…

But there is another alternative that I find judicious in many ways… It is #smartrezo! It’s a media/social network platform that doesn’t use any tracker, and it’s not a piece of cake! On this platform your data cannot be exploited. This is not the only benefit of this platform; its architecture avoids the bubbles usually observed in the usual social networks. And above all, this platform puts the human being at the heart of the system…

The other important point is that #smartrezo proposes an online store kit and a marketplace that also respect customers’ data and do not collect browsing data… No risk of seeing these data recovered by the big online retailers, giving back all their meaning and relevance to small retailers.

Why are these kinds of initiatives important? Because they not only protect our data, but also prevent us from being at the mercy of foreign companies. They protect aspects that are key to our culture and way of life and preserve the approach and creativity we can have on different subjects. It is also a pillar that allows us to protect a responsible business that ultimately provides jobs and value locally..

 

Conclusion

 

The fight for #DigitalSovereignty is not only about BtoB and infrastructures (sovereign Cloud), if these fights must be led, we must not forget the protection of the data of the largest number, that of the “lambda” Internet users. It is important to promote original alternatives that are French and respectful of our values and our model of society. It is also worth noting that many initiatives based on open source exist but are often aimed at a digitally savvy public. All these initiatives are important, because they allow us to propose serious alternatives to the hold of the #MAGAF, and it is obvious that it is from the variety of the offer and the approaches that we will be able to escape from the harmful hold of the American digital giants who have an avowed goal of hegemony on the world, first of all in the West. Do not forget that all the great leaders of these giants are evangelists of the transhumanist ideology. And I want to be clear, this is not the model of society that I want to see set up…

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