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Comment by sgift | Hacker News Reader

Reading about all of this is so surreal for me as a German. I read about these "great" policy and all I can think is ... "so, they do the minimum required" .. what's there to praise? Then I remember how US (companies) tend to think about privacy and get very sad. Stronger penalties for anyone breaking relevant privacy rules cannot come fast enough.

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In everything that keeps happening in the US with regard to leaks and advertisers watching you and Facebook profiling you... I’m not sure it’s fixable.

Until a large chunk of congress, and probably the R chunk due to their privacy law stance, gets a TON of embarrassing stuff leaked to the public or better yet ‘shared’ when they weren’t expecting it... I don’t think anything will change. We won’t get real laws to protect people.

And a decent sized part of me says not even incidents like that would do it. It would just be blame-the-victim and you-accepted-that-policy and the laws wouldn’t really change.

I fear that R chunk will only pass legislation to exempt themselves.

Mass surveillance is too enticing to give up so easily.

Europe may have strong laws regarding privacy. Those laws don’t apply to government requests. That’s a difference.

Germanys data protection laws bind the government too. The government cannot request any data they like without a valid reason (though still too much in my opinion).

There are a lot of checks in the US that require a "valid reason", but in the end the people granting those requests tend to rubber stamp everything that goes across their desk, and the only rejections are for people who make errors on the request form.

It might stop a really egregious violation (spying on political rivals for example), but for general public the protection is pretty weak.

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