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Comment by teekert | Hacker News Reader

This, the GDPR and California's Bill No. 37 [0] make me feel that there is still hope for humanity and that governments do favor civilians over companies, at least from time to time.

[0] https://www.bankinfosecurity.com/californias-new-privacy-law...

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That's one of the things I like most about the EU, its strong laws in favor of citizens (privacy, health, etc).

The sad thing is that these progressive ideas seem to come from the ivory tower of the EU, and are then pushed onto the member states, sometimes against their will.

Whilst these are great ideas, this is not really democracy. I think it's also the source of much anti EU sentiment. I wish more of this stuff would be decided in public debates. I wish elections had more of an effect on the EU.

At the moment it feels like policy is being made by academics and beurocrats. And whilst it is good policy, it still feels wrong. I am afraid we are keeping it this way because we think otherwise we would have shite policy.

Agreed, but there are differences between the GDPR per members country, for example, in the Netherlands we are not free to use data derived from people that specifically said their data would be usable for science (data like tumor gene expression values). You need to ask for consent again. Or if you can't, you need to prove you can't and then you need to publish everything you derive from the data. This is different in the UK.

>this is not really democracy

Literally every single part of the EU apparatus is democratic. Every single bit.

The European Council consists of the Heads of Government of the EU states. If your Head of Government isn't democratically elected then you're already fucked and the EU isn't making anything worse.

The European Commission is chosen by the European Council, so derives its mandate from that.

The European Parliament is literally elected.

The Council of the European Union is basically 'all the agricultural ministers' or 'all the finance ministers' or 'all the defence ministers' etc. Obviously these people all have democratic mandates in their home countries, thus the body as a whole has a democratic mandate.

By no means in any way is there any possible justification for describing the EU has undemocratic. It's actually much MORE democratic than many of its members.

If you reside in a country where those laws apply, that is.

Meanwhile in Australia, government agencies can obtain your phone and internet ‘metadata’ without a warrant and (ISPs^?) DNS servers are required by law to blacklist certain domains.

^ I assume ISPs because I have no issue with blacklists while using CF/Google DNS.

DNS blocking is a thing in some EU countries too, but maybe not at the same scale.

Yes, in the Netherlands all major ISPs block most Pirate Bay proxies. Hooray for TOR.

You don't need TOR to get around DNS blocks (assuming that's how your ISP is blocking TPB). I configure my router to use Google's public DNS server 8.8.8.8 and that completely circumvents the "block".

To be fair the DNS blacklisting requires court approval, so it does satisfy principles of justice.

Your point is correct and fair based on then way I wrote the comment but it wasn’t my intention to mislead. I need to learn how to ragetype better.

I do think it’s super interesting that the additional gambling site bans happened reasonably quiet last week.

I say reasonably as I play poker, and care if poker is banned, but agree banning gambling is a net positive. Even then I didn’t hear about the ban until 4 days after it happened.

I have yet to see any high profile GDPR enforcement. Let's define high profile as something that deters successive violators.

IANAL 99.9% of websites visited from Europe are blatantly non compliant.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/21/technolog/google-europe-g...

Link doesn't work, which makes a purely link based reply useless.

Somehow the 'y' got stripped from technology. You can always Google the slug to get article. It's the nytimes domain.

In any case Google were fined 50 Million Euro for GDPR violation.

Let's agree to disagree, I still consider Google a repeat offender, nothing has changed. The amount I found reported goes under cost of business and not deterring fines anyway.

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