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The way I understand it it's extremely simple. Say you have a site. You are the contact point with the data subject, and therefore you are the controller. Anyon

The way I understand it it's extremely simple. Say you have a site. You are the contact point with the data subject, and therefore you are the controller. Anyone you subcontract spying on your users to is a data processor acting on your behalf, and therefore you are responsible for their behavior. You should have agreements in place with all your external resource providers that touch personal data. If any personal data leaks to them, you are responsible for notifying users of this and obtaining their consent if required. In most cases for external assets where no personal data is expected to flow to the asset provider (say loading fonts from a CDN) it's sufficient for the asset provider to give you their assurance that they don't collect or store data from visitors you send their way. If you have an adverterrorist-operated spyware embed like most ad networks on your site, then it's your responsibility to ensure that the adverterrorists are handling the data in a compliant way, and you need to notify your users of your relationship and obtain their consent to pass their data to a third party. Just because you are using a third party to do the spying does not remove your responsibility.

Silhouette 8y ago
Say you have a site. You are the contact point with the data subject, and therefore you are the controller. But that's not what how the controller is defined in the regulations. To be the controller, you must be "the natural or legal person, public authority, agency or other body which, alone or jointly with others, determines the purposes and means of the processing of personal data". If you don't even have any way to know what personal data a third party is collecting or how it's being used, and you're linking to content that is freely available but over which you have no control, you're not even close to fitting that definition. You should have agreements in place with all your external resource providers that touch personal data. But that fundamentally breaks most of the modern WWW, which is not a reasonable thing to do. You can't even have a personal blog linking to a jQuery CDN to expand or contract your sidebar or Google Fonts to make things look pretty at that point. Just because you are using a third party to do the spying does not remove your responsibility. If they're spying at your request and on your behalf, that's one thing. But it is inherent in the technologies of the web that third parties may be doing all kinds of things without your knowledge, consent or control. Moreover, even if you have somehow satisfied yourself that there is nothing inappropriate going on when you first incorporate external content in your page by reference, there is in general no technical mechanism to guarantee that the situation will not change later. In some limited cases tools like subresource integrity can help, but they only address specific parts of the general issue.

Silhouette 8y ago

Say you have a site. You are the contact point with the data subject, and therefore you are the controller. But that's not what how the controller is defined in the regulations. To be the controller, you must be "the natural or legal person, public authority, agency or other body which, alone or jointly with others, determines the purposes and means of the processing of personal data". If you don't even have any way to know what personal data a third party is collecting or how it's being used, and you're linking to content that is freely available but over which you have no control, you're not even close to fitting that definition. You should have agreements in place with all your external resource providers that touch personal data. But that fundamentally breaks most of the modern WWW, which is not a reasonable thing to do. You can't even have a personal blog linking to a jQuery CDN to expand or contract your sidebar or Google Fonts to make things look pretty at that point. Just because you are using a third party to do the spying does not remove your responsibility. If they're spying at your request and on your behalf, that's one thing. But it is inherent in the technologies of the web that third parties may be doing all kinds of things without your knowledge, consent or control. Moreover, even if you have somehow satisfied yourself that there is nothing inappropriate going on when you first incorporate external content in your page by reference, there is in general no technical mechanism to guarantee that the situation will not change later. In some limited cases tools like subresource integrity can help, but they only address specific parts of the general issue.