Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by skilled 1614 days ago
Jack, you are free to promote Fathom but I don't think you have the right to spread false information.

In fact, I don't think I will ever use or recommend Fathom to anyone after seeing you act so childish.

2 comments

I'm confused. Open up Plausible, look for /event in your inspect element (devtools in chrome), look at the IP address that it connects to. Run that IP through ipinfo.io and see which country comes up. If it's the US, it's illegal (as per this entire thread).

What's childish about me not wanting people to potentially get fined?

Yes, I just checked it. It is a testing environment deployed on Cloudflare Workers. What's the problem here exactly? It is the same exact script using the same exact tech behind Plausible.

At what point exactly are they going to get fined? I don't understand so I would love to know, so as long as you actually manage to answer with somewhat of a technical depth.

Maybe you should do one of those "Fathom vs Plausible" pages on your website, then point out that Plausible is using a testing environment and because of that they will be fined.

Sure, happy to explain further. You have found the testing /event but there is another (make sure your ad-blockers are off).

I've put together the details here in an image, so it's easy to follow (https://imgur.com/a/9wEanqD). Hope that explains what I'm talking about.

Sending data from the EU to US-controlled cloud infrastructure is illegal. Please read the noyb article again, read the Schrems II ruling and read the EDPB's advice.

But Plausible doesn't send its data to US-controlled cloud infrastructure? By the looks of it, they're using a self-hosted testing environment through a CDN.

This is unique to Plausible itself and not the services they provide for their customers.

Why do you insinuate misbehavior from a competitive company when you don't have actual proof?

You have the URL of a CDN network that is hosted in the US. What you don't have is the proof of this data being stored in the US. Because it is not. Their FAQ pages clearly state that none of the data is ever stored outside of EU.

Last but not least, you entirely missed my point. Plausible is an extremely successful business, do you really believe they would risk their reputation / livelihood without understanding Schrems II or otherwise?

I honestly have nothing else to say mate. But good luck with Fathom. I am sure it will be a great success.

Yes they do. It's not just about data being stored, it's data processing as a whole. You cannot casually pass EU data subject Personal Data to US-controlled infrastructure.

CDN is processing of Personal Data in the clear. Please read Use Case 6 of the EDPB's recommendations, specifically what they say about US cloud providers (https://edpb.europa.eu/sites/default/files/consultation/edpb...).

And I'm not interested in commenting on what I think Plausible would or wouldn't risk, as it's not relevant.

Well, it's very relevant. Why else would you try and smear a company that is your competitor, yet fights the same fight you're fighting?

And also, you're completely wrong.

As a Plausible customer, your data is never processed in the US, or sent to the "cloud" outside of EU.

What I'm hearing from my Govt agency clients is precisely that. EU Datacenters hosted by EU Subsidiaries of American companies are not ok.
Correct. That's absolutely right. I'm not 100% sure how my comment wasn't clear, but I will apologize to everyone if I confused them. Anyway, Plausible updated their analytics to use Bunny yesterday, which is a win for their customers. We wrote more about this solution back in 2021 (https://usefathom.com/blog/eu-isolation) after a lot of work. We spent a lot of time looking into possible options, the law, and are pleased that our innovation is going to help other companies.