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Comment by munchhausen | Hacker News Reader

Why are so sure of that?

As a European of 30+ years, I am actually pretty optimistic in that there is, in all areas of politics, a certain point at which EU governments will refuse to follow the US down the rabbit hole.

Germany feels pretty strongly about privacy (albeit not absolute privacy), and I doubt that they will start passing laws just "because the US did it".

UK, I'll give you that. Then again, the UK is culturally closer to the US than to mainland Europe in many ways, this being one of them.

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I'm a bit less optimistic. Take the recent seizure of Cock.li servers in Germany [1].

Regardless of what you think of the Cock.li service or its owner, the seizure of all the company's emails suggests that demands from police authorities or politicians take precedence over data privacy concerns - even in privacy-conscious Germany.

[1] http://arstechnica.co.uk/tech-policy/2016/01/cock-li-server-...

I hope / believe this is true. And then the EU will be the beneficiaries of being the countries best situated to provide technological devices and services without weakened security.

"Made in Estonia with European-grade security"

"EuroSec(tm) certified to respect your privacy"

The two biggest political parties in the UK are both broadly pro-surveillance and see things like the ECHR as an annoyance. As elsewhere the majority of the public in the UK is disinterested. The vocal minority are ignored or outvoted.

Switzerland is also quite adamant in protecting privacy. And from what I hear a great place to start a business.

As for UK, from what I understand they have an open channel with US in terms of information exchange for anti-terrorism. Perhaps due to that it's expected from them to follow suit with US in legislation if they want to stay in the same terms. That would probably extend to a few other countries who are in such a privileged relationship.

Hopefully. But I feel this is changing. See my reply to StringyBob in this sub-thread

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