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Comment by magduf | Hacker News Reader

Except that there's other countries where their governments don't seem to have these problems.

where? From what I've seen Europe, UK, USA, Canada, and especially China are all moving in this direction of more privacy intrusions. Considering the West has traditionally offered the most freedom for its citizens I'd say things are trending towards authoritarian governments

EU seems to be pretty concerned with data privacy, and they even have laws protecting it.

They have laws protecting individuals from companies, not the government. The GDPR has special exceptions for government investigations, and many EU countries have strong domestic spy agencies that spy on their citizens.

Aside from the UK (which is doing its best to leave the EU, and never really felt like an EU country anyway), which countries are actually spying on their citizens like that to any great extent?

The EU had (until 2014 when it was ruled to violate fundamental rights) a data retention charter which required member states to store all telecommunications data generated within the EU for a period between 6-24 months[1].

The GDPR explicitly allows for government surveillance to be excluded from the directive's protection.

Privacy International and a bunch of other NGOs have filed complaints[2] against "Belgium, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, and the U.K." for violating rulings by the European Court of Justice over illegal mass surveillance. Here's another article[3].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Retention_Directive [2]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/emmawoollacott/2018/06/25/eu-na... [3]: https://medium.com/privacy-international/a-new-era-of-mass-s...

coughs in American

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